When trained on a duration discrimination task for 10 days, 11-year-old children exhibit no perceptual learning, whereas adults improve significantly when trained on the identical task. Of course, it is possible that some other training regimen might lead to performance improvement in young animals, but the key point is that they do not display an adult form of learning. If auditory training during development does not yield an immediate change in performance, then perhaps it provides some advantages for future performance, and this only becomes evident in adulthood. Only a few experiments have asked how learning during development influences

adult perceptual skills. For example, when gerbils are trained on an AM detection task during development, the experience exerts Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Library clinical trial a unique improvement on adult perceptual skills; the identical training in adults does not result in the same improvement (Sarro and Sanes, 2011). In humans, musical training is associated with a broad range of perceptual skills in adulthood (Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010). Therefore, auditory experience can produce distinct behavioral outcomes, depending on the specific balance of acoustic stimulation and learning. To summarize, even very brief exposure to specific sounds may enhance

perceptual skills. This is best illustrated by experiments in which animals are actively engaged in learning, DAPT purchase and especially when natural communication sounds are involved. In contrast, the behavioral impact of prolonged exposure to arbitrary waveforms is poorly understood (for a cogent valuation of controlled rearing experiments and perceptual development, see Chapter 12 in Gibson, 1969). Studies in which the rearing environment is chronically biased to one sound (e.g., tones

or clicks) demonstrate convincingly that the environment can influence neural processing (below). However, it has been challenging to interpret this data in the absence of behavioral phenotypes. Moving forward, we suggest that environmental Bay 11-7085 manipulations can be optimized to address questions concerning both normal development and pathology. To understand the natural activity-dependent mechanisms that regulate nervous system development, neurophysiologists should embrace paradigms that more closely resemble the exposure and learning that animals experience in the natural world. Thus, to understand how auditory perception might mature through unsupervised, statistical learning mechanisms, future sound rearing studies may exploit a novel set of statistical relationships of modest complexity (McDermott and Simoncelli, 2011). They can also address the impact of statistical relationships that are available at irregular and unpredictable times during the day.