Learning by Exposure in the Visual System

It is increasingly being understood that perceptual learning involves different types of plasticity. Thus, whereas the practice-based improvement in the ability to perform specific tasks is believed to rely on top-down plasticity, the capacity of sensory systems to passively adapt to the stimuli they are exposed to is believed to rely on bottom-up plasticity. However, top-down and bottom-up plasticity have never been investigated concurrently, and hence their relationship is not well understood. To examine whether passive exposure influences perceptual performance, we asked subjects to test their orientation discrimination performance around and orthogonal to the exposed orientation axes, at an exposed and an unexposed location while oriented sine-wave gratings were presented in a fixed position. Here we report that repetitive passive exposure to oriented sequences that are not linked to a specific task induces a persistent, bottom-up form of learning that is stronger than top-down practice learning and generalizes across complex stimulus dimensions. Importantly, orientation-specific exposure learning led to a robust improvement in the discrimination of complex stimuli (shapes and natural scenes). Our results indicate that long-term sensory adaptation by passive exposure should be viewed as a form of perceptual learning that is complementary to practice learning in that it reduces constraints on speed and generalization.