Pranjal N. Patel¹ (), Jamie G.E Cochrane¹, Allison B. Sekuler^1,2,3, Patrick J. Bennett¹; ¹Department Of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, ²Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, ³Department Of Psychology, University of Toronto

Visual Perceptual Learning (PL) typically exhibits stimulus and position specificity: learning does not fully generalize to new stimuli or to familiar stimuli presented at new positions. One explanation of specificity is that PL results from neural changes in cortical areas such as V1 and V2, and specificity occurs because neurons in those areas respond to specific stimulus characteristics (e.g., orientation) at particular locations in the visual field. An alternative explanation is that learning alters how higher-order mechanisms integrate responses from lower-level inputs. According to this explanation, specificity reflects what is learned rather than where it occurs in the visual pathway (Mollon & Danilova, Spatial Vision, 1996). As a continuation of Cochrane et al., (Journal of Vision, 2025) we investigated this alternative explanation by examining the position-specificity of PL in a 1-of-5 texture identification task requiring higher-order processing. The stimuli were band-limited noise textures that varied randomly on every trial. Because the textures varied randomly, observers could not learn idiosyncratic features of a small set of stimuli. Instead, they had to adopt a strategy that could be applied to a large population of bandpass textures. During training, all textures were presented slightly above or below a central fixation point, and the position was switched during the test phase. Preliminary results indicate that learning occurs in this task (i.e., identification accuracy improved during training) and that there is partial transfer of learning to a new position. These preliminary results suggest that position-specific learning can occur in a high-level task, and support the idea that specificity reflects what is learned rather than where it occurs in the visual pathway.

Acknowledgements: NSERC