Primer Defining a Link between Perceptual Learning and Attention

Abstract

Experienced jewelers routinely classify diamonds that appear very similar to the uninitiated into different grades with high precision. Within a few seconds, airport baggage security officers can detect forbidden inconspicuous materials through x-ray images. Such feats are possible because the experts ’ “eyes ” are trained through practice and experience. Long after most aspects of brain development have ceased, repeated exposures or trainings improve our perceptual/sensory abilities, and cause neural reorganizations in the brain. Such experience-induced improvement, called perceptual learning [1], and the accompanying neural changes, called neural plasticity [2–6], underlie not only our ability to master a trade but operate at a more fundamental level to help us make sense of the world. We are constantly exposed to an overwhelming amount