查看文章

Practice in perceptual tasks over hundreds or thousands of trials often leads to long-lasting improvements in performance that generalize only partially to new stimuli. However, the time courses of the general and stimulus-specific aspects of learning are still debated. Some researchers argue that general aspects of the task are learned first in an initial rapid phase of learning and that stimulus-specificity emerges more slowly. In contrast, Hussain et al.(Front Psychol. 2012; 3: 226) reported that 105 trials in a 10-AFC face identification task on Day 1 was sufficient to produce stimulus-specific learning in a test phase on Day 2, suggesting that stimulus-specific improvements can emerge rapidly. The current experiments extend these findings by examining 1) whether similar, rapid stimulus-specific learning occurs in a 10-AFC texture identification task; 2) if this rapid stimulus-specificity is long-lasting by increasing the …