Adults can still acquire new perceptual skills. Even performance in simple tasks, involving detection and discrimination along basic dimensions (e.g. orientation, frequency) can hugely improve. I shall describe behavioral and ERP data, from auditory and visual tasks, indicating that this improvement is specific to the broad stimulus context in which learning occurred. Specificity to local aspects of the stimulus follows. This global-to-local dynamics of specificity suggests that learning follows a reverse hierarchy. Namely, it begins at high-levels along the hierarchy of processing, and only subsequently reaches lower-levels. I will discuss the implications of this dynamics and the similarity between learning simple (e.g. frequency discrimination) and complex (e.g. language acquisition) tasks.  

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Podcast interview (58min)