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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

High-Level Perceptual Learning for Initially Ambiguous Stimuli

Logan T. Dowdle¹, Mario Senden¹; ¹Maastricht University

Presenter: Logan T. Dowdle

Perceptual skills are frequently studied using simple stimuli like Gabor patches to isolate basic perceptual mechanisms. However, in everyday expert decision-making, perceptual skills are deeply intertwined with higher-order cognition and semantic knowledge. For example, pathologists must accurately distinguish between various tissue types by interpreting complex visual patterns in microscopy images. To investigate how perceptual and semantic representations emerge for initially ambiguous stimuli and interact in the brain, we conducted a high-resolution 7T fMRI pilot study in which a lay participant learned to distinguish tissue with high and low tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) count from histopathology images. The participant underwent daily perceptual training with feedback, paired with at-home semantic study of cancer types. fMRI data were collected in five sessions distributed over the training period wherein the participant performed a TIL classification task. This allowed us to track behavioral learning and corresponding changes in cortex-wide neural representations.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF