• DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhx039
• Corpus ID: 3838093

Long Time No See: Enduring Behavioral and Neuronal Changes in Perceptual Learning of Motion Trajectories 3 Years After Training

@article{Frank2018LongTN,
  title={Long Time No See: Enduring Behavioral and Neuronal Changes in Perceptual Learning of Motion Trajectories 3 Years After Training},
  author={Sebastian M. Frank and Mark W. Greenlee and Peter U. Tse},
  journal={Cerebral Cortex},
  year={2018},
  volume={28},
  pages={1260–1271}
}

• Sebastian M. Frank, M. Greenlee, P. Tse
• Published 1 April 2018
• Psychology, Biology
• Cerebral Cortex

Here, we report on the long-term stability of changes in behavior and brain activity following perceptual learning of conjunctions of simple motion features. Participants were trained for 3 weeks on a visual search task involving the detection of a dot moving in a "v"-shaped target trajectory among inverted "v"-shaped distractor trajectories. The first and last training sessions were carried out during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Learning stability was again examined behaviorally and using fMRI 3 years after the end of training. Results show that acquired behavioral improvements were remarkably stable over time and that these changes were specific to trained target and distractor trajectories. A similar pattern was observed on the neuronal level, when the representation of target and distractor stimuli was examined in early retinotopic visual cortex (V1-V3): training enhanced activity for the target relative to the surrounding distractors in the search array and this enhancement persisted after 3 years. However, exchanging target and distractor trajectories abolished both neuronal and behavioral effects, suggesting that training-induced changes in stimulus representation are specific to trained stimulus identities.