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From chess to medicine: How does perceptual learning shape our expertise?
Perceptual learning refers to how we strengthen our perceptual abilities through continuous experience in specific professional activities, and ultimately improve our professional skills. This involves not only simple sensory discrimination, but also complex knowledge processing, such as a doctor identifying a tumor in an X-ray, or a chess player identifying the relative positions of pieces on a chess board. The process of perceptual learning is a profound and ongoing process. It is not only ubiquitous in daily life, but also has important application value in various professional fields.
The basis of perceptual learning lies in changes in the brain's neural circuits, a process that continues throughout an individual's life.
Basic sensory identification
Many laboratory studies have shown that individuals' sensory sensitivity can be significantly improved through specially designed perceptual learning tasks. For example, the visual Vernier sensitivity test asks observers to judge the relative position of two lines. Untrained individuals typically perform quite well on this task, but training improves their recognition thresholds by up to six times. Similar improvements can be observed in visual motion recognition and direction sensitivity. Through proper training, these skills become more and more automatic, and even the recognition speed of new objects will not slow down as the number of items increases.
In a visual search task in which observers locate a target object hidden among a crowd of distractors, research has shown that experience significantly increases sensitivity and speed.
Tactile perceptual learning also showed significant results in spatial discrimination tasks and was transferable between siblings. Experiments through daily reading of Braille have led to the realization that blind people have greater tactile spatial acuity than sighted people, demonstrating the power of learning even across different perceptual modalities.
Perceptual learning in nature
Perceptual learning can be seen everywhere in daily life. Experience shapes our vision and hearing and exists in the unique experience of each individual. Many phenomena result from the accumulation of this experience. For example, regarding the identification of money, daily contact allows people to quickly identify its value, but when faced with subtle differences like coins, they may not be able to make an immediate judgment.
Gibson's 1955 study showed that when we are continuously exposed to similar stimuli, our discrimination ability will improve between categories, but we will be insensitive to small changes in the same category. This phenomenon also has the same effect in speech recognition, where infants' sensitivity to the same speech category decreases significantly by 10 months of age.
Expert chess players can quickly and accurately identify the relationship between different positions on the chess board. This does not depend on their superior visual ability, but on their ability to extract patterns in specific chess types.
The history of perceptual learning
The proverb "Practice makes perfect" provides a good overview of the basic idea of perceptual learning. In fact, as early as the mid-19th century, there were records describing how sensory training reduced the minimum distance that people could distinguish on their skin. Over time, people came to realize that consistent practice not only promotes recognition accuracy but also enhances overall perception.
William James mentioned in "Principles of Psychology": "My experience is what I agree to pay attention to."
This view was supported by subsequent behavioral and physiological research. They show that the improvement of professional abilities not only depends on a specific mechanism, but also includes the allocation of attention during development and the accumulation of systematic experience.
Characteristics of perceptual learning
The effects of perceptual learning can be divided into two categories: discovery effect and fluency effect. The discovery effect involves the selection of new information, the amplification of relevant information, or the suppression of irrelevant information. In contrast, the fluency effect focuses on the convenience and speed of retrieval. Experts can show faster speed and lower attention load when processing high-order information.
“As difficulty increases, attentional resources can be reserved for exploring new relationships and engaging in higher-level thinking.”
With the evolution of attention, research has found that perceptual learning does not always rely on selective attention. Through the study of spatial diffusion learning signals, different learning effects also show that some senseless training can significantly promote the improvement of learning effects.
Potential for education and application
The application potential of perceptual learning has been widely explored in the field of education. How to promote students' perceptual sensitivity through designing practice activities has become a hot topic in current research in psychology and education. In addition, more in-depth analysis of future perceptual learning is needed to apply it to clinical training, medical diagnosis, and even other professional fields.
From chess to medicine, perceptual learning not only changes our professional abilities, but also affects our understanding of the world. This kind of learning process is of course continuous, with every experience accumulated. Do you agree with the importance of this kind of perceptual learning in different fields?
