Cueing in a perceptual task causes long-lasting interference that generalizes across context to affect only late perceptual learning and is remediated by the passage of time

摘要

Perceptual learning, the improvement in sensory discriminations with practise, is also subject to stimulus-specific interference from temporal jitter in a learning session or manipulations applied between or immediately after sessions. We demonstrate a novel form of perceptual interference where even a brief cueing exposure to a complex speech-in-noise task produces a forward interference on subsequent speech-in-noise learning. This potent interference generalizes across cueing context but specifically affects only late learning in the subsequent task, is resistant to the remediating effects of sleep and persists across an overnight delay involving sleep, and can be evoked by a single exposure 1 day before the learning. Learning in the speech-in-noise task is due to generalized improvements in discriminating and extracting signals (speech) from noise and we hypothesize that the forward interference represents interference with improvements in access to higher-level representations in rapid perception of ecologically-familiar complex signals such as speech from background noise.