Psychophysical investigations of perceptual learning and attention: new insights into old principles

Our environment is very complex and contains a multitude of visual stimuli. Therefore it is important that visual areas in the brain remain able to adapt to new visual experiences. This research focused on the ability to improve visual skills such as orientation discrimination, which is referred to as perceptual learning. It was investigated in how far performance improvements after learning generalize to other conditions, how one can interfere with learning and what role attention plays in all this. Our results show that skill-related memory-traces keep being modified by new experiences, which means memory traces are never immune from changes.