Funding informationCambridge New Directions in the Study of the Mind Project Perceptual learning involves long-term changes to perception due to practice or experience. While perceptual learning has been studied for over a century in philosophy and psychology, research into the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying perceptual learning remains an area of ongoing development. This review explores what perceptual learning is and how it occurs, with a focus on areas of controversy. It then turns to several current debates. First, it explores the debate as to whether such learning involves genuine perceptual change at all, rather than a change in action, attention, or decision-making. Second, it questions the role that higher-cognitive mechanisms, like attention, might play in perceptual learning. Does perceptual learning require attention, or can it occur through mere exposure in the absence of attention? Third, it examines a debate about what perceptual learning means for the perception-cognition divide. Does it blur the divide or preserve it?

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content.

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