Perceptual learning of pop-out and the primary visual cortex

Abstract I propose that perceptual learning of tasks to detect targets among uniform background items involves changing intra-cortical interactions in the primary visual cortex (V1). This is the case for tasks that rely mainly on bottom-up saliency to guide attention to the task relevant locations quickly, and rely less on top-down knowledge of the stimuli or on other strategies. In particular, suppression between V1 neurons responding to background, rather than target, visual items is predicted to increase over the course of such learning. Various other predictions are derived from this proposal, based on the theory that V1 creates a bottom-up saliency map to guide attention. Different tasks depend to different degrees on attention driven by bottom-up saliency; this leads to differences among findings from various studies of perceptual learning of pop out or detection tasks.