LAUSR

Almost 40 years after classic papers (Ball & Sekuler, 1982; Fiorentini & Berardi, 1980; McKee & Westheimer, 1978) that triggered a wave of research on perceptual learning, the field remains vibrant and relevant. Rehabilitation for humans with visual impairments (Legge & Chung, 2016) associated with amblyopia (Levi & Li, 2009; Lu, Lin, & Dosher, 2016; Polat, Ma-Naim, Belkin, & Sagi, 2004), macular degeneration (Janssen & Verghese, 2016; Plank et al. 2014), strokes (Melnick, Tadin, & Huxlin, 2016) and age-related presbyopia (Deveau & Seitz, 2014; Polat et al., 2012) is critically important. Understanding how perceptual learning generalizes or transfers to new locations or stimuli remains an important focus in the field (Green, Kattner, Siegel, Kersten, & Schrater, 2015), with new research investigating transfer across sensory modalities (McGovern, Astle, Clavin, & Newell, 2016), as well as investigating computational approaches (Dosher, Jeter, Liu, & Lu, 2013). The interaction between perceptual learning and other cognitive functions, such as attention (Ni, Ruff, Alberts, Symmonds, & Cohen, 2018; Szpiro & Carrasco, 2015), eye movements (Kwon, Nandy, & Tjan, 2013; Szpiro & Carrasco, 2015; Tsank & Eckstein, 2017), and category learning (Cantwell, Riesenhuber, Roeder, & Ashby, 2017; Carvalho & Goldstone, 2016; Rosedahl, Eckstein, & Ashby, 2018), is an increasing area of research focus. Such efforts will help place perceptual learning in more ecologically valid contexts and help us understand the common mechanisms involved in other visuo-cognitive functions. This special issue follows the 5th International Workshop on Perceptual Learning organized in Patagonia, Argentina. The papers in the issue comprise of work presented at the workshop and additional independent contributions submitted in response to the call for papers. Together, the work in this issue advances the field along traditional questions in perceptual learning and expands the field in new directions. The papers can be grouped into three main themes: (1) the classic theme of specificity vs. generalization (transfer) of learning; (2) psychophysical training to overcome visual deficits; and (3) interactions of perceptual learning with other cognitive and motor functions.