Is eliminating the irrelevant key to learning?

She walked towards the tree and started feeling the fallen fruits with her hand, one by one. After a while, she knew the best one. She bit into it and relished the juicy, sweet fruit that she had picked. She secretly admired her own ability to pick the best one. She remembered how her brother used to do it for her. Now that he was a grown man, he had to go hunting with their father. She was left alone to find food for herself. Initially, she got the fruits that were not so ripe. Sometimes, they weren’t sweet enough. With time, she mastered the art of picking the perfect fruits. Her brother had told her that it was not something which could be taught but something she would master with experience, and now she realized that it was true. She just knew that it was the perfect fruit.

How did she learn to do that? Did she have an implicit memory for all the times she felt the fruits and thus could efficiently discriminate between the features? Or with experience, did she get attentionally tuned to very specific features of the fruit while eliminating other incoming sensations? What this little girl from the age of hunter-gatherers is doing is what modern-day psychologists call perceptual learning. With multiple exposures, one develops the ability to alter their perception of the incoming sensations. This ability serves as an important function for perceptual discrimination.

Perceptual narrowing is a phenomenon that occurs when we are unable to discriminate between stimuli that are irrelevant or those that do not occur frequently. This is highly important in order to have an increased sensitivity to stimuli that we are exposed to frequently. By eliminating our perceptual effects for irrelevant stimuli we are able to better discriminate between the relevant and irrelevant ones. With experience, we start getting an idea of what might be relevant to us and focus our attention exclusively on those sensations. This combination of perceptual narrowing and attention might have been critical for perceptual learning. Now we know how the girl eliminated irrelevant sensations as she touched the fruit and focused on exactly the ones she wanted. And how did she know what she wanted? Experience, just like how her brother had told her.