reducing crowding by weakening inhibitory lateral interactions in the periphery with perceptual learning削弱抑制横向互动减少拥挤的外围与知觉学习.pdfVIP

Reducing Crowding by Weakening Inhibitory Lateral Interactions in the Periphery with Perceptual Learning 1 2 3 1 4 1 Marcello Maniglia *, Andrea Pavan , Luigi F. Cuturi , Gianluca Campana , Giovanni Sato , Clara Casco 1 Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, 2 Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, SISSA, Trieste, Italy, 3 Integrated Centre for Research and Treatment of Vertigo, Balance and Ocular Motor Disorders, University Hospital Munich-Großhadern, Munich, Germany, 4 Centro di Riabilitazione Visiva Ipovedenti c/o Istituto L. Configliachi, Padua, Italy Abstract We investigated whether lateral masking in the near-periphery, due to inhibitory lateral interactions at an early level of central visual processing, could be weakened by perceptual learning and whether learning transferred to an untrained, higher-level lateral masking known as crowding. The trained task was contrast detection of a Gabor target presented in the near periphery (4u) in the presence of co-oriented and co-aligned high contrast Gabor flankers, which featured different target-to-flankers separations along the vertical axis that varied from 2l to 8l. We found both suppressive and facilitatory lateral interactions at target-to-flankers distances (2l - 4l and 8l, respectively) that were larger than those found in the fovea. Training reduces suppression but does not increase facilitation. Most importantly, we found that learning reduces crowding and improves contrast sensitivity, but has no effect on visual acuity (VA). These results suggest a different pattern of connectivity in the periphery with respect to the fovea as well as a different modulation of this connectivity via