Learning-Dependent Changes in Brain Responses While Learning to Break Camouflage: A Human fMRI Study

摘要

Camouflage represents an extreme case of figure-ground segregation whereby a target object is effectively disguised against its background even when in 'plain view.' While it is possible to learn to break camouflage with training, the mechanisms that underlie this learning remain poorly understood. We carried out an in-scanner learning experiment in which subjects learned to break the camouflage of up to three different target objects (counter-rotated across subjects) in randomly interleaved trials. We created camouflaged scenes, each of which contained a single novel foreground 'digital embryo' target camouflaged against a background of additional novel digital embryos. Subjects performed a bootstrapped learning task in which they reported whether or not a given camouflaged scene contained a target.