The change is due to the development of new neural pathways in the brain that with continued experience will take the place of the old pathways and improve perception.

Hi Thomas Blakely,

When you say perception is improved, do you infer perception is changed. Assume that there are two slightly different pitches (or colors), A and B. One cannot discriminate the two before. But after perceptual learning, one can. Then, whether pitch A (or color A) is perceived differently before and after the perceptual learning or pitch B (or color B) is perceived differently, or both? Or is it possible that the perception of the two pitches (or colors) stays constant but some other mechanism changed so that one can discriminate the two.

Dear Zhi Li,

Perception is a sensory input mechanism that forms conception. The new concept changes perception.

some of us continue to believe that "perception" is a term with a lot of loose baggage attached to it, which can be useful in talking to a lay audience, but which gets you in a lot of trouble if you use it in discussions of the processing of sensory information by human observers. Sensory processing in objective terms refers to detection, discrimination and identification (or recognition) of sensory stimuli. Practice, especially with systematic reinforcement of correct responses, generally improves performance, although there are usually limits that can may be interpreted in terms of internal noise, the "grain" of the neural receptor, or the size and neural density (loosely speaking) of the central region to which the receptors eventually connect.. As a reasonable rule of thumb, practice improves performance on the practiced task, and to lesser degrees on other tasks, depending on how closely they resemble the original task. Nowhere in this discussion has there been a mention of variation in "perception", a property of conscious experience known only to the perceiver. Of course, if the goal is to learn how the perceiver's claims about his or her experience change with practice, then rather than measure changes in detection, discrimination or recognition one can ask the subject how things seem to appear (or sound). This view reeks, of course, of old-fashioned behaviorism. But before casting it into outer darkness because of that label, it might be worth considering whether there is anything fundamentally wrong with continuing to maintain a distinction between studies of sensory capabilities and those of response proclivities.