Training Helps Improve Visual Perception, New Study Shows
When presented with a series of visual stimuli in a rapid succession, a person often fails to recognise some of the objects presented. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘attentional blink’. But even if it is hard, the brain can be trained to improve its ability to retain attention, a new study suggests.
Attention is a crucial part of the visual perception, explained Takeo Watanabe, study author and a professor in the Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. According to him, one great way to improve one’s visual ability is to improve the attentional function. In a series of experiments, Watanabe and his team tried to investigate the effects of training the brain to switch attention quicker.
Training the Brain for Improved Visual Perception
In the first experiment, 10 volunteers sat down in front of a computer and were showed with a rapid sequence of white-on-black letters, and two white-on-black numbers. Each character was presented in a very short period of time (a tenth of a second). The challenge on the participants was to type the numbers they saw. The training lasted for a hundred of rounds. Before the training, the researchers observed that participants were more likely to recognise the second number when it was presented more than half a second after the first one. But when presented in less than half a second, there was a measurable attentional blink.
To train the participants, the researchers coloured the second number with red so they could recognise it easily. At the end of the training, the participants went back on the attentional blink test. It was found that even with more rapid sequence, participants were able to recognise the second number right much more often. At this point, there was no more attentional blink.
After two months, they invited the same people who went through the training and found that they still performed better in the attentional blink tests.
To know whether changing the colour is more effective in improving visual perception rather than repeating the test over again, the researchers run the same test to a new group of participants and didn’t change the colour of the second number. They found that without changing the colour, the subjects didn’t show an improved visual performance. On another experiment, the researchers changed the colour of the second character regardless if it was the target or not. The participants also failed on the test.
The researchers also checked the subjects’ brain activities during the test, before and after the training using the MRI machine to know whether the training was indeed effective. The researchers explained that if the improvement in the visual perception was due to the improvement in brain’s processing, they would expect to see the brain activity the same even if the sequence was shown in a slower or faster sequence. But what they saw was different. This helped them prove their original theory that training can improve one’s attention skills, and not the mere processing of visual stimuli.