Developing expertise in any field usually requires acquisition of a wide range of skills. Most current studies on perceptual learning have focused on a single task and concluded that learning is quite specific to the trained task, and the ubiquitous individual differences reflect random fluctuations across subjects. Whether there exists a general learning ability that determines individual learning performance across multiple tasks remains largely unknown. In a large-scale perceptual learning study with a wide range of training tasks, we found that initial performance, task, and individual differences all contributed significantly to the learning rates across the tasks. Most importantly, we were able to extract both a task-specific but subject-invariant component of learning, that accounted for 38.6% of the variance, and a subject-specific but task-invariant perceptual learning ability, that accounted for 36.8% of the variance. The existence of a general perceptual learning ability across multiple tasks suggests that individual differences in perceptual learning are not “noise”; rather, they reflect the variability of learning ability across individuals. These results could have important implications for selecting potential trainees in occupations that require perceptual expertise and designing better training protocols to improve the efficiency of clinical rehabilitation.

在任何领域发展专业知识通常需要掌握广泛的技能。当前关于知觉学习的大多数研究都集中在单个任务上，并得出结论，学习是非常受训的任务，并且普遍存在的个体差异反映了受试者之间的随机波动。能否确定跨多个任务的个人学习表现的一般学习能力仍然未知。在一项具有广泛培训任务的大规模感知学习研究中，我们发现初始绩效，任务和个体差异都对整个任务的学习率有重要贡献。最重要的是，我们能够提取特定于任务但主题不变的学习成分，占变异的38.6％，以及特定于学科但任务不变的知觉学习能力，占差异的36.8％。跨多个任务的一般感知学习能力的存在表明，感知学习中的个体差异不是“噪音”；相反，它们反映了个体学习能力的差异。这些结果可能对选择需要感知专业知识的职业中的潜在学员以及设计更好的培训协议以提高临床康复效率具有重要意义。它们反映了个体学习能力的差异。这些结果可能对选择需要感知专业知识的职业中的潜在学员以及设计更好的培训协议以提高临床康复效率具有重要意义。它们反映了个体学习能力的差异。这些结果可能对选择需要感知专业知识的职业中的潜在学员以及设计更好的培训协议以提高临床康复效率具有重要意义。