Editorial: Improving visual deficits with perceptual learning

Frontiers in Psychology

Gianluca Campana¹ 

关键词: myopia;    presbyopia;    amblyopia;    crowding;    nystagmus;    tRNS;    macular degeneration;    blindness;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00491

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The capability of improving performance on visual tasks with practice has been a matter of intense investigation during the last 40 years (Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Sagi, 2011). This phenomenon, called perceptual learning, has been proven to occur with virtually any visual skill or stimulus characteristic (Fahle and Poggio, 2002), and to be long-lasting, thus involving neural plasticity at the level of perceptual or even sensory areas (Sagi and Tanne, 1994). Despite this, only recently has perceptual learning started to be considered a useful tool for improving visual functions in clinical populations. This delayed exploitation has possibly been caused by the common finding that learning was highly specific for the trained stimulus attributes (Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Ball and Sekuler, 1981; Ahissar and Hochstein, 1996; Schoups et al., 2001; Campana and Casco, 2003; Fahle, 2005), or even for the trained eye or retinal location (Karni and Sagi, 1991), thus resulting impractical for therapeutic purposes. More recently it has become clear that, under specific training conditions, perceptual learning could generalize to other stimuli, tasks and circumstances (McGovern et al., 2012), yielding potential benefits for various types of visual impairments. So far, perceptual learning has been shown to be effective in improving, among other dysfunctions, visual abilities in amblyopia (Levi and Li, 2009; Polat, 2009; Hussain et al., 2012), mild refractive defects (myopia: Tan and Fong, 2008; Camilleri et al., 2014a; presbyopia: Polat et al., 2012), central or peripheral vision loss and cortical blindness (Kasten et al., 1998; Sabel et al., 2005; Huxlin et al., 2009; Chung, 2011; Das et al., 2014), dyslexia (Gori and Facoetti, 2015), and has even been shown to improve the efficacy of other sensory modalities so that they can somehow replace vision (so called sensory substitution) in blind people (Bach-y-Rita and Kercel, 2003; Ortiz et al., 2011).

【 授权许可】

CC BY