



The results were reported Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.






Sathian says what the students were engaged Cheap oakley outlet in is an example of perceptual learning, a category of learning also including learning to read letters of the alphabet, discriminate tumors on an X-ray and recognize musical tones or instruments.

The studyâ€™s findings could have implications for helping people with conditions such as stroke and Parkinsonâ€™s disease â€“ in which areas in the brain involved in perceptual learning can be damaged — but also more fundamentally, in understanding where perceptual learning â€œlivesâ€ in the brain.

â€œItâ€™s a shift away from thinking that each part of the brain has one modular function,â€ Sathian says. â€œIt suggests that changes seen in perceptual learning are found more in the network, in the connections and interactions between regions of the brain.â€

Study participants had their brains scanned with fMRI while performing the dot-reading task. After a week of practice, their ability to discriminate increased. A control group had no training (and didnâ€™t experience either perceptual improvement or brain changes). Another control consisted of all study participants also performing a slightly different task: estimating how long the dots were present before being taken away. Participants were not trained on this control task, and the fMRI scans identified brain regions showing changes specific for the trained (spatial) task.

For neuroscience aficionados — the areas of the brain where activity increased specifically when someone was trained in the spatial-touch-discrimination task were: the anterior insula, the pre-SMA (supplementary motor area), the putamen, anterior thalamus and cerebellum.

Brain areas specifically activated by the tactile "reading" task in people who had trained on it

Brain areas specifically activated during the tactile perception task in people who had trained on it

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