Broad-based visual benefits from training with an integrated perceptual-learning video game.

Perception is the window through which we understand all information about our environment, and therefore deficits in perception due to disease, injury, stroke or aging can have significant negative impacts on individuals' lives. Research in the field of perceptual learning has demonstrated that vision can be improved in both normally seeing and visually impaired individuals, however, a limitation of most perceptual learning approaches is their emphasis on isolating particular mechanisms. In the current study, we adopted an integrative approach where the goal is not to achieve highly specific learning but instead to achieve general improvements to vision.

The therapeutic benefits of perceptual learning.

The modern field of perceptual learning addresses improvements of sensory and perceptual functioning in adult observers and provides powerful tools to ameliorate the effects of neurological conditions that involve a sensory or attentional deficit. While the sensory systems were once thought to be plastic only during early development, modern research demonstrates a great deal of plasticity in the adult brain. Here we discuss the value of perceptual learning as a method to improve sensory and attentional function, with a brief overview of the current approaches in the field, including how perceptual learning can be highly specific to the training set, and also how new training approaches can overcome this specificity and transfer learning effects to untrained tasks.