Within-quadrant position and orientation specificity after extensive orientation discrimination learning is related to performance gains during late learning - Fig 3

Mean performance during training (A) and transfer testing phase (B, C). A, Each data point of the learning curve corresponds to the average of ten thresholds (1 per participant), with each participant’s threshold based on four staircase thresholds. In three participants, blocks do not correspond to daily sessions (details in text). B, The data from the transfer phase (one data point per participant, based on the average of eight staircase thresholds) shows thresholds for 135° (black symbols) and 45° (grey symbols) stimuli conditions at the trained position at 6° eccentricity (circles) and the average of all surrounding generalization test positions–each tested with 8 threshold in all participants (squares). C, Same data as in B except that the square symbols only represent the data from the two directly surrounding test positions at 3° and 9° eccentricity. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. Some participants underwent four staircases in each of 15 sessions (P 1, 5, 6, 7,8, 9,10), whereas others underwent eight staircases in each of 10 sessions (P 2, 3, 4), with session referring to a single testing period in a single day in which either 4 or 8 staircases thresholds were collected. Participants with 15 sessions of 4 staircases had a mean of 90.06 trials per staircase (sd 15.97) (average of 360.24 trials/session) and the participants with 10 sessions of 8 staircases had a mean of 88.04 trials per staircase (sd 14.02) (704.32 trials/session). We wanted to compare and average the learning curves over participants despite the different distribution of numbers of staircase thresholds over daily sessions in the above-referred participants. To do this, we chose here to display average thresholds as a function of blocks of 4 staircases in all participants. In 7 out of 10 participants, blocks correspond to sessions. In the other three participants, each single training session of 8 staircases is split in 2 blocks. This means that for P2-4 data based on the final 20 thresholds are not included here, but their effect in generalization is evaluated in separate analyses (see results in section 3.5 and 3.6).