TY - JOUR
T1 - Perceptual learning
T2 - How much daily training is enough?
AU - Wright, Beverly A.
AU - Sabin, Andrew T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments We thank Karen Banai, David Brandel, Julia Huyck, Julia Mossbridge, Jeanette Ortiz, Yuxuan Zhang, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Matt Fitzgerald, Jeanette Ortiz, and Chris Stewart collected much of the data reported here. This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD.
PY - 2007/7
Y1 - 2007/7
N2 - The acquisition of many perceptual skills proceeds over a course of days. However, little is known about how much daily training is needed for such learning to occur. Here we investigated this question by examining how varying the number of training trials per day affected learning over multiple days on two auditory discrimination tasks: frequency discrimination and temporal-interval discrimination. For each task, we compared improvements in discrimination thresholds between different groups of listeners who were trained for either 360 or 900 trials per day for 6 days. Improvement on frequency discrimination required >360 trials of training per day while learning on temporal-interval discrimination occurred with 360 training trials per day, and additional daily practice did not increase the amount of improvement. It therefore appears that the accumulation of improvement over days on auditory discrimination tasks may require some critical amount of training per day, that training beyond that critical amount yields no additional learning on the trained condition, and that the critical amount of training needed varies across tasks. These results imply that perceptual skills are transferred from short- to long-term memory (consolidated) daily, but only if a task-specific initiation requirement has been met.
AB - The acquisition of many perceptual skills proceeds over a course of days. However, little is known about how much daily training is needed for such learning to occur. Here we investigated this question by examining how varying the number of training trials per day affected learning over multiple days on two auditory discrimination tasks: frequency discrimination and temporal-interval discrimination. For each task, we compared improvements in discrimination thresholds between different groups of listeners who were trained for either 360 or 900 trials per day for 6 days. Improvement on frequency discrimination required >360 trials of training per day while learning on temporal-interval discrimination occurred with 360 training trials per day, and additional daily practice did not increase the amount of improvement. It therefore appears that the accumulation of improvement over days on auditory discrimination tasks may require some critical amount of training per day, that training beyond that critical amount yields no additional learning on the trained condition, and that the critical amount of training needed varies across tasks. These results imply that perceptual skills are transferred from short- to long-term memory (consolidated) daily, but only if a task-specific initiation requirement has been met.
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U2 - 10.1007/s00221-007-0898-z
DO - 10.1007/s00221-007-0898-z
M3 - Article
C2 - 17333009
AN - SCOPUS:34250838088
VL - 180
SP - 727
EP - 736
JO - Experimental Brain Research
JF - Experimental Brain Research
SN - 0014-4819
IS - 4
ER -