Auvray Malika, Hanneton Sylvain, Lenay Charles, O'Regan Kevin
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, CNRS UMR 8581, Université Paris 5 René Descartes, Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
J Integr Neurosci. 2005 Dec;4(4):505-21. doi: 10.1142/s0219635205001002.
Sensory substitution constitutes an interesting domain of study to consider the philosopher's classical question of distal attribution: how we can distinguish between a sensation and the perception of an object that causes this sensation. We tested the hypothesis that distal attribution consists of three distinct components: an object, a perceptual space, and a coupling between subjects' movements and stimulation. We equipped sixty participants with a visual-to-auditory substitution device, without any information about it. The device converts the video stream produced by a head-mounted camera into a sound stream. We investigated several experimental conditions: the existence or not of a correlation between movements and resulting stimulation, the direct or indirect manipulation of an object, and the presence of a background environment. Participants were asked to describe their impressions by rating their experiences in terms of seven possible "scenarios". These scenarios were carefully chosen to distinguish the degree to which the participants attributed their sensations to a distal cause. Participants rated the scenarios both before and after they were given the possibility to interrupt the stimulation with an obstacle. We were interested in several questions. Did participants extract laws of co-variation between their movements and resulting stimulation? Did they deduce the existence of a perceptual space originating from this coupling? Did they individuate objects that caused the sensations? Whatever the experimental conditions, participants were able to establish that there was a link between their movements and the resulting auditory stimulation. Detection of the existence of a coupling was more frequent than the inferences of distal space and object.
感觉替代构成了一个有趣的研究领域，可用于思考哲学家关于远端归因的经典问题：我们如何区分一种感觉与引起这种感觉的物体的感知。我们测试了这样一个假设，即远端归因由三个不同的成分组成：一个物体、一个感知空间，以及主体运动与刺激之间的耦合。我们为60名参与者配备了一种视觉到听觉的替代设备，且未提供任何相关信息。该设备将头戴式摄像头产生的视频流转换为声音流。我们研究了几种实验条件：运动与产生的刺激之间是否存在相关性、对物体的直接或间接操纵，以及是否存在背景环境。参与者被要求通过根据七种可能的“场景”对他们的体验进行评分来描述他们的印象。这些场景经过精心挑选，以区分参与者将他们的感觉归因于远端原因的程度。参与者在有机会用障碍物中断刺激之前和之后都对这些场景进行了评分。我们对几个问题感兴趣。参与者是否提取了他们的运动与产生的刺激之间的协变规律？他们是否推断出源于这种耦合的感知空间的存在？他们是否识别出引起这些感觉的物体？无论实验条件如何，参与者都能够确定他们的运动与产生的听觉刺激之间存在联系。检测到耦合的存在比推断远端空间和物体更为频繁。
