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The secret of sensory learning: Why can we hear subtle differences in pitch?
Sensory learning enables us to continually enhance and refine our perceptual abilities in every day life. It's not just the ear's ability to distinguish pitch, but also many other senses such as sight, touch and smell. Scientific research shows that through systematic practice, we can achieve significant improvements in our perceptual sensitivity.
Sensory learning is the ability of an individual to produce different perceptions based on experience and knowledge when faced with the same sensory stimulation.
Laboratory studies have shown that through properly structured practice, individuals can achieve significant improvements in perceptual sensitivity. Taking the visual Vernier sensitivity training as an example, the experimental subjects need to judge whether a line is displaced by another line. Untrained subjects tended to perform well on the task, but after training, their sensitivity increased by up to six times. Such improvements were also seen in tests of visual motion recognition and directional sensitivity.
Not only that, in the visual search task, the subjects need to find the target object among many interference factors. Studies have shown that experience can significantly improve a subject's sensitivity and speed. In one study, subjects improved their ability to find slanted lines from about 200 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds, showing that with adequate practice, visual search becomes automatic and efficient, regardless of the number of objects in a scene. The time spent is no longer extended.
Sensory learning is ubiquitous in life: experiences shape how we see and hear things.
Sensory learning occurs almost all the time in daily life. The extent to which we understand different cultures and races directly affects our stereotypes of them. Through experience, people are usually better at identifying similar stimuli, and we may find this challenging when faced with coins hidden among similar shapes.
However, sensory learning is not limited to our daily lives. Over time, experimental studies have shown that sensitivity to differences between stimuli in the same category decreases. This phenomenon is called category perception. Infants who hear variations in speech but belonging to the same phoneme category appear to lose sensitivity to them by 10 months of age and become habituated to distinctions with linguistic associations.
The accumulation of experience and the extraction of structural patterns in the process are the reasons why professionals excel in their fields.
For chess players, their ability to quickly interpret complex situations on the chessboard is not due to amazing visual abilities, but rather through the continuous extraction of patterns related to the specific structure of the chess game. In this evolution, subjective perception is transformed into sensory specialization. Between a mother and her newborn baby, the ability to understand each other grows as she learns to recognize subtle differences in her baby's cries, reflecting a deep sensory learning process.
Through proficient literary training, the structural rules of English will become clearer. One phenomenon in this process is called the word superiority effect - people tend to recognize whole words more quickly than individual letters. Further experiments also showed that among the variants of sounds, even if they were similar in physical properties, but the phoneme categories were different, the subjects' reaction speed was significantly improved, which once again confirmed the operation of central perceptual experience.
The idea of "practice makes perfect" suggests that one's overall sensory experience can be further enhanced.
The potential of sensory learning has long been discovered by humans. Whether it's wine tasting, fabric evaluation or sensitivity to musical preferences, it has been documented as early as the mid-19th century. Tactile training on the skin also showed that as the training progressed, individuals' ability to distinguish sensitive areas of touch was significantly improved. This improvement continued into the next few days, and the improvement effect was often limited to the trained area. .
These existing research results make us think, how deep is the sensory learning process? How does the gap between the perception abilities of most people and those of professionals affect our lives and work?
