Editorial: Improving visual deficits with perceptual learning

The capability of improving performance on visual tasks with practice has been a matter of intense investigation during the last 40 years (Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Sagi, 2011). This phenomenon, called perceptual learning, has been proven to occur with virtually any visual skill or stimulus characteristic (Fahle and Poggio, 2002), and to be long-lasting, thus involving neural plasticity at the level of perceptual or even sensory areas (Sagi and Tanne, 1994). Despite this, only recently has perceptual learning started to be considered a useful tool for improving visual functions in clinical populations. This delayed exploitation has possibly been caused by the common finding that learning was highly specific for the trained stimulus attributes or even for the trained eye or retinal location (Karni and Sagi, 1991), thus resulting impractical for therapeutic purposes. More recently it has become clear that, under specific training conditions, perceptual learning could generalize to other stimuli, tasks and circumstances (McGovern et al., 2012), yielding potential benefits for various types of visual impairments. So far, perceptual learning has been shown to be effective in improving, among other dysfunctions, visual and has even been shown to improve the efficacy of other sensory modalities so that they can somehow replace vision (so called sensory substitution) in blind people (Bach-y-Rita and Kercel, 2003; Ortiz et al., 2011). The goal of this Research Topic is to demonstrate the development of innovative methods, based on perceptual learning, for treating—or at least overcoming some of the deleterious effects of—various visual dysfunctions, from mild deficits such as myopia to complete blindness. New frontier methods should aim at finding the most effective procedures both in terms of perceptual learning and transfer to useful visual functions. This is made possible by combining different techniques aimed at boosting learning or its generalization, such as training with different stimulus features (Xiao et al., 2008; Harris et al., 2012), exploiting multisensory facilitation (Shams and Seitz, 2008) and reinforcement procedures (Seitz and Watanabe, 2009), or combining perceptual learning with non-invasive brain stimulation procedures (Fertonani et al., 2011). Also, in order to achieve the best possible compliance with the patients, shorter and/or more enjoyable trainings (possibly self-administered at home) should be preferred. For example, while training on either off-the shelf video games (Li et al., 2011; Franceschini et al., 2013), or specifically designed video games involving detection of low contrast stimuli (Deveau et al., 2014a,b) has been shown to improve a …