Habituation of visual adaptation

Abstract

Our sensory system adjusts its function driven by both shorter-term (e.g. adaptation) and longer-term (e.g. learning) experiences. Most past adaptation literature focuses on short-term adaptation. Only recently researchers have begun to investigate how adaptation changes over a span of days. This question is important, since in real life many environmental changes stretch over multiple days or longer. However, the answer to the question remains largely unclear. Here we addressed this issue by tracking perceptual bias (also known as aftereffect) induced by motion or contrast adaptation across multiple daily adaptation sessions. Aftereffects were measured every day after adaptation, which corresponded to the degree of adaptation on each day. For passively viewed adapters, repeated adaptation attenuated aftereffects. Once adapters were presented with an attentional task, aftereffects could either reduce for easy tasks, or initially show an increase followed by a later decrease for demanding tasks. Quantitative analysis of the decay rates in contrast adaptation showed that repeated exposure of the adapter appeared to be equivalent to adaptation to a weaker stimulus. These results suggest that both attention and a non-attentional habituation-like mechanism jointly determine how adaptation develops across multiple daily sessions.