Schedule of Events | Symposia

Generalization and Specificity of Offline Performance Gains in Visual Perceptual Learning

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Theodore LaBonte-Clark¹ (theodore_labonte-clark@brown.edu), Teruaki Kido¹, Takeo Watanabe¹, Yuka Sasaki¹; ¹Brown University

Sleep is instrumental for various types of procedural learning, including improvement on basic visual tasks, referred to as visual perceptual learning (VPL). Sleep after training on VPL tasks leads to further task improvement, referred to as off-line performance gains, but the specificity or transfer of these off-line gains to different locations in the visual field remains unclear. Here, we show that off-line performance gains occur at both trained and untrained locations in the visual field. In our experiment, we trained two groups to detect an orientation presented in one upper quadrant of the visual field. They were tested at both the trained and untrained upper quadrants immediately following training and again 12 hours later. The wake group trained in the morning and retested in the evening, while the sleep group trained in the evening and retested the following morning. Only participants in the sleep group slept between posttests. The sleep group exhibited off-line performance gains at both trained and untrained locations, indicating location transfer. Conversely, the wake group does not show a clear pattern of location transfer at this stage of data collection. Our results suggest that sleep may facilitate location transfer of VPL in an orientation detection task, generalizing learning to untrained locations. Interestingly, previous research reported no off-line transfer of learning to untrained orientations in a similar orientation detection task (Tamaki et al., 2020, Nature Neuroscience). Comparing our findings with prior work highlights the possibility that distinct mechanisms underlie specificity and generalization of VPL for features and locations.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision