Bottom-up and top-down influences at untrained conditions determine perceptual learning specificity and transfer

  1. Ying-Zi Xiong
  2. Jun-Yun Zhang
  3. Cong Yu  Is a corresponding author
  1. Peking University, China

Abstract

Perceptual learning is often orientation and location specific, which may indicate neuronal plasticity in early visual areas. However, learning specificity diminishes with additional exposure of the transfer orientation or location via irrelevant tasks, suggesting that the specificity is related to untrained conditions, likely because neurons representing untrained conditions are neither bottom-up stimulated nor top-down attended during training. To demonstrate these top-down and bottom-up contributions, we applied a 'continuous flash suppression' technique to suppress the exposure stimulus into sub-consciousness, and with additional manipulations to achieve pure bottom-up stimulation or top-down attention with the transfer condition. We found that either bottom-up or top-down influences enabled significant transfer of orientation and Vernier discrimination learning. These results suggest that learning specificity may result from under-activations of untrained visual neurons due to insufficient bottom-up stimulation and/or top-down attention during training. High-level perceptual learning thus may not functionally connect to these neurons for learning transfer.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Ying-Zi Xiong

    School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Jun-Yun Zhang

    School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Cong Yu

    School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
    For correspondence
    yucong@pku.edu.cn
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8453-6974

Reviewing Editor

  1. Joshua I Gold, University of Pennsylvania, United States

Ethics

Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish was obtained from each observer before testing. This study was approved by the Peking University Institution Review Board.

Version history

  1. Received: February 18, 2016
  2. Accepted: July 4, 2016
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: July 5, 2016 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: July 28, 2016 (version 2)
  5. Version of Record updated: August 18, 2016 (version 3)

Copyright

© 2016, Xiong et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 1,917
    views
  • 337
    downloads
  • 23
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Ying-Zi Xiong
  2. Jun-Yun Zhang
  3. Cong Yu
(2016)
Bottom-up and top-down influences at untrained conditions determine perceptual learning specificity and transfer
eLife 5:e14614.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.14614

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.14614

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Kenta Abe, Yuki Kambe ... Tatsuo Sato
    Research Article

    Midbrain dopamine neurons impact neural processing in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) through mesocortical projections. However, the signals conveyed by dopamine projections to the PFC remain unclear, particularly at the single-axon level. Here, we investigated dopaminergic axonal activity in the medial PFC (mPFC) during reward and aversive processing. By optimizing microprism-mediated two-photon calcium imaging of dopamine axon terminals, we found diverse activity in dopamine axons responsive to both reward and aversive stimuli. Some axons exhibited a preference for reward, while others favored aversive stimuli, and there was a strong bias for the latter at the population level. Long-term longitudinal imaging revealed that the preference was maintained in reward- and aversive-preferring axons throughout classical conditioning in which rewarding and aversive stimuli were paired with preceding auditory cues. However, as mice learned to discriminate reward or aversive cues, a cue activity preference gradually developed only in aversive-preferring axons. We inferred the trial-by-trial cue discrimination based on machine learning using anticipatory licking or facial expressions, and found that successful discrimination was accompanied by sharper selectivity for the aversive cue in aversive-preferring axons. Our findings indicate that a group of mesocortical dopamine axons encodes aversive-related signals, which are modulated by both classical conditioning across days and trial-by-trial discrimination within a day.