Perceptual learning: An analysis based on selective attention measurements

An experiment was carried out to assess the relative merits of the differentiation and association theories of perceptual learning. Two Hebrew and two Roman characters were used to form stimuli describable by three orthogonal dimensions: form, system, and name. Two groups of subjects, who differed in their ability to read Hebrew, did a series of card sorting tasks. The results indicated that the subjects who could read Hebrew were able to use the name dimension in a classification task, whereas the non-Hebrew readers were not. This finding shows that long-term associative learning can facilitate perceptual classification.