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Improvements in performance on many perceptual skills can occur with only a single training session. Of interest here is what aspects of the training experience are being learned during this brief exposure. Although there is considerable evidence that learning associated with specific feature values of the stimulus used in training (stimulus learning) contributes to these rapid improvements, there has been little direct investigation of the possibility that other types of learning do so as well. Here the authors show that not only stimulus learning but also learning of more general aspects of the training experience (procedure learning) contributed to rapid improvements in performance on interaural time difference discrimination. However, practice on the type of judgment to be made did not appear to aid performance (no task learning). These results are consistent with physiological reports that different neural mechanisms are engaged at different time points during even a brief training session, and imply that the circuits that are engaged and likely modified vary in the degree of their selectivity to the target condition. Such changes presumably enable further learning.

Training‐induced improvements on perceptual skills can be enhanced by increasing the amount of training and by resting between training and testing. However, how these two factors affect the generalization of learning from a briefly trained condition to an untrained one is unknown. Here, listeners were trained on an interaural‐level‐difference (ILD) discrimination condition (4‐kHz tones), then were tested for generalization to an interaural‐time‐difference (ITD) discrimination condition (0.5‐kHz tones). The amount of training and the time between training and testing differed across four groups. Listeners tested 10 hours after training had significantly lower ITD discrimination thresholds than naive listeners (n=94), regardless of whether training lasted for 20 min (n=14) or 2 hs (n=11). Thus, when there was a long time between training and testing, learning generalized from ILD to ITD discrimination regardless of the amount of training. In contrast, listeners tested immediately after training on ILD disc...

Listeners often show rapid improvements when first performing auditory discrimination tasks. This learning was explored by investigating how training 300–1500 trials on one of three conditions (all 2IFC) influenced interaural‐time‐difference (ITD) discrimination on a target ITD condition (lateralization, 0‐μs ITD, 500 Hz). Listeners trained on ITD or interaural‐level‐difference (ILD) discrimination had equivalent ITD‐discrimination thresholds that were significantly lower than those of naive listeners. However, listeners trained on duration discrimination had ITD‐discrimination thresholds between those of naive and ITD‐trained listeners. These data suggest that rapid decreases in ITD‐discrimination threshold result partly from learning the general procedure (induced by the duration training) and partly from learning the lateralization task (induced by the ILD training). In contrast, compared to naive listeners, final within‐subject standard deviations of the ITD‐discrimination thresholds were significantly smaller for ITD‐trained, somewhat smaller for ILD‐trained, and no smaller for duration‐trained listeners. These data suggest that rapid reductions in threshold variabiilty result partly from learning the lateralization task (induced by the ILD training) and partly from learning something provided, here, only by ITD training. Thus, at least three different types of learning can contribute to initial improvements in performance on auditory discrimination tasks. [Work supported by NIDCD.]