Visual perceptual learning (VPL) does not occur when a salient visual feature is exposed in a task-irrelevant manner. To test whether elevated arousal levels can affect the VPL of salient and task-irrelevant visual features, we trained two participant groups (Arousal – AG – and Control – CG – groups) over the course of 5 daily sessions on a contrast categorization task. Participants categorized a Gabor patch (one of 6 contrasts), presented in the upper left or lower right visual quadrant into high- or low- contrast subsets. The Gabor had two orientations (2.5o left or right tilted from vertical), counterbalanced across the contrast levels. The orientation of the Gabor was salient but task irrelevant. Unbeknownst to the participants, an arousing soundbeep was paired with one of the orientations (the paired orientation) with 80% likelihood in the AG, while no beep was provided in the CG. Participants’ fixation stability and pupil diameters were monitored throughout the training sessions to ensure that the beep successfully induced an increase in their arousal levels. To test whether VPL occurred for the task-irrelevant orientation visual feature, participants performed an orientation discrimination task for different contrasts in both quadrants before and after the training sessions. While there were no performance changes in the CG, performance improved for both the orientations in both visual quadrants for AG. Our results suggest that elevated arousal levels can induce generalized VPL of a salient visual feature, the learning of which would be otherwise suppressed if only exposed in a task-irrelevant manner.