What Is Perceptual Learning?

Perceptual learning is the process in which an individual's processing of sensory materials changes or improves through the accumulation of experience or practice.

Perceptual learning

Gestalt psychologist M. Wertheimer denies

Theories about perceptual learning can be summarized into two categories: differentiation theory and enrichment theory. In fact, these two theories are not fundamentally different, they may explain different forms of perceptual learning.

Perceptual learning differentiation

Differentiation theory treats perceptual learning as discovering previously ignored sensory stimuli and turning it into effective information. The change in perception is learning to respond to new aspects of sensory stimuli. This theory holds that the objective world is extremely rich, it has a large amount of information, and people's ability to receive stimuli is limited. At the beginning, people can only roughly differentiate and select objects. With the accumulation of experience, people acquire The ability of information is gradually improved, and the stimuli that were previously indifferent have gradually differentiated, and perception has transitioned from grasping the general characteristics of objects to grasping the essential characteristics of objects. This change of perception does not replace the original reaction with a new one, but instead forms a higher-level and more complex perception structure or schema based on the different characteristics in the process of continuous interaction between the subject and the stimulus.

Perceptual learning enrichment

The theory of enrichment holds that perceptual learning is the use of association and past experience to enrich sensory experience, and the change of perception is to learn to respond differently to the same sensory stimulus. The theory of perceptual inference represented by E. Brunswick and others is a kind of enrichment theory. This theory holds that perception is formed instantaneously under the influence of external stimuli, so the input of information is extremely preliminary. This part of information can only be used as a clue to extract relevant information from past experience, as a basis for hypothesizing or inferring the nature of external objects, and using existing experience to make up for the lack of instant input information to form a complete perception.

The effects of learning on perception are diverse, mainly learning to respond to new stimuli or learning to respond to existing stimuli. Through learning, on the one hand, you can distinguish the stimulus features that were previously ignored; on the other hand, you can make new evaluations of stimuli and learn to respond to the differences between stimuli. In real life, people do not recognize objects based on their isolated characteristics, but on the condition that stimuli are constantly changing, find out relatively constant or stable characteristics from many of their characteristics, and identify them. Everything can be achieved only through perceptual learning.