Do we learn to see ambiguous shapes a certain way, or just remember?
People quickly locked into seeing an ambiguous spinning cube one way at each screen location whether or not they were 'trained', suggesting that these lasting biases come from short-term perceptual memory rather than classic associative learning.
Source
Perceptual memory drives learning of retinotopic biases for bistable stimuli
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Lab psychophysics with intermittently flashed ambiguous rotating Necker cubes above or below fixation: Exp 1 compared a group given two unambiguous training trials per location with an untrained group over a 400-trial block; Exp 2 inserted 5 minutes of continuous ambiguous viewing at one location between intermittent blocks
- N
- 55 observers took part overall, including a pilot replication. Exp 1 analysed 12 trained and 7 untrained participants after 4 trained participants were excluded; in Exp 2 the final-percept analysis covered 24 participants, 13 of whom had learned the trained bias at both locations.
- Population
- Naive adult observers with normal vision recruited through the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham
- Outcome
- Perceptual bias (how consistently each location's ambiguous cube was seen rotating in the same direction), its time course across the block, and whether the bias after continuous viewing matched the last percept seen
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What they did
Observers watched a wire-frame cube that could be seen spinning either left or right, flashed briefly above or below a fixation point, and reported which way it seemed to turn. In Experiment 1, one group first saw two unambiguous (depth-cued) cubes at each location spinning in opposite directions, while another group received no such training; both then viewed about 400 ambiguous cubes. In Experiment 2, after a trained block, the cube was shown continuously for 5 minutes at one location only, so perception flipped back and forth, and then brief intermittent presentations resumed at both locations.
What they found
Strong location-specific biases appeared immediately in both groups and stayed stable across the session; the unambiguous training trials made no significant difference to the size of the bias, and there was no gradual build-up that would signal slow associative learning. In Experiment 2, continuous viewing wiped out the trained bias at the stimulated location but left the other, unstimulated location untouched. Afterwards, the new bias at the stimulated location usually matched the last percept seen during continuous viewing (19 of 24 participants), rather than the earlier training.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The groups were small, especially the untrained group, and a null effect of training in such samples could miss a modest difference. Because biases were already at a high level from the start, the authors acknowledge a ceiling effect may have hidden any slow learning that did occur during training, so the study does not rule associative learning out entirely. The work uses one kind of ambiguous figure and one kind of context cue (retinal location), so it cannot say whether the same account applies to non-spatial cues, which the authors note behave differently. Four trained participants whose biases went against training were excluded, which slightly favours finding a training effect rather than hiding one.
Key terms
- Bistable stimulus
- A single physical image that can be seen in two different ways, with perception switching between them, such as the Necker cube.
- Perceptual stabilisation
- The tendency, when an ambiguous image is shown in brief repeated flashes, to keep seeing it the same way you saw it last time.
- Cue recruitment
- A paradigm in which an initially uninformative signal, such as screen position, comes to bias how an ambiguous figure is seen after pairing with unambiguous versions.
- Retinotopic specificity
- An effect that is tied to a particular location on the retina, so it does not transfer to a stimulus shown elsewhere in the visual field.
- Perceptual association
- The authors' term for a lasting link between a location and a percept that is driven by one's own past interpretations rather than by physical stimulus features.
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Quiz yourself
In Experiment 1, what effect did the unambiguous training trials have on the size of the perceptual bias?
Common questions
Why does it matter whether this is 'conditioning' or 'memory'?
Classical conditioning assumes learning from pairing a cue with an unambiguous stimulus. If the bias forms just as well without any unambiguous trials, the learning is being driven by the brain's own interpretations, which calls for a different theory of how perception is shaped by experience.
How did continuous viewing 'reset' the bias?
Watching the cube non-stop made perception flip back and forth many times, so both interpretations were experienced. When brief flashes resumed, people tended to keep seeing whichever direction they had seen last, regardless of what they had been trained on.
Why present the ambiguous cube to only one eye?
Showing a flat motion-defined cube to both eyes would give a binocular cue that the display is flat, conflicting with the 3D motion; presenting it to one eye removed that conflict and kept the direction of rotation genuinely ambiguous.
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