Despite decades of research, the mechanisms behind fast flashes of insight that change how a person perceives their world, termed “one-shot learning,” have remained unknown. A mysterious type of one-shot learning is perceptual learning, in which seeing something once dramatically alters our ability to recognize it again.
A new study, led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, addresses the moments when we first recognize a blurry object, a primal ability that enabled our ancestors to avoid threats.
Published online in Nature Communications, the new work pinpoints for the first time the brain region called the high-level visual cortex (HLVC) as the place where “priors”—images seen in the past that are then stored—are accessed to enable one-shot perceptual…