Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, UMR CNRS 5105, Université Pierre Mendès-France, Grenoble, France.
PLoS One. 2012;7(8):e44020. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044020. Epub 2012 Aug 30.
Some previous studies have revealed that while congenitally blind people have a tendency to refer to visual attributes ('verbalism'), references to auditory and tactile attributes are scarcer. However, this statement may be challenged by current theories claiming that cognition is linked to the perceptions and actions from which it derives. Verbal productions by the blind could therefore differ from those of the sighted because of their specific perceptual experience. The relative weight of each sense in oral descriptions was compared in three groups with different visual experience Congenitally blind (CB), late blind (LB) and blindfolded sighted (BS) adults.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants were asked to give an oral description of their mother and their father, and of four familiar manually-explored objects. The number of visual references obtained when describing people was relatively high, and was the same in the CB and BS groups ("verbalism" in the CB). While references to touch were scarce in all groups, the CB referred to audition more frequently than the LB and the BS groups. There were, by contrast, no differences between groups in descriptions of objects, and references to touch dominated the other modalities.
CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: The relative weight of each modality varies according to the cognitive processes involved in each task. Long term memory, internal representations and information acquired through social communication, are at work in the People task, seem to favour visual references in both the blind and the sighted, whereas the congenitally blind also refer often to audition. By contrast, the perceptual encoding and working memory at work in the Objects task enhance sensory references to touch in a similar way in all groups. These results attenuate the impact of verbalism in blindness, and support (albeit moderately) the idea that the perceptual experience of the congenitally blind is to some extent reflected in their cognition.
一些先前的研究表明，尽管先天性盲人倾向于将视觉属性（“言语主义”）用于描述，但听觉和触觉属性的描述却很少。然而，这一说法可能会受到当前理论的挑战，这些理论认为认知与它所产生的感知和行为有关。因此，盲人的言语表达可能与明眼人不同，因为他们具有特殊的感知体验。本研究比较了具有不同视觉经验的三组成年人（先天性盲人、后天盲人、蒙眼明眼人）在口头描述中对每种感觉的相对权重。
方法/主要发现：要求参与者口头描述他们的母亲和父亲，以及四个熟悉的手动探索物体。在描述人物时，获得的视觉参考数量相对较高，并且在 CB 和 BS 组中相同（CB 中的“言语主义”）。尽管所有组的触觉参考都很少，但 CB 比 LB 和 BS 组更多地提及听觉。相比之下，各组在描述物体时没有差异，并且触觉参考主导着其他感觉。
结论/意义：每种模态的相对权重根据每个任务涉及的认知过程而有所不同。在“人物”任务中，长期记忆、内部表示和通过社会交流获得的信息起作用，似乎在盲人和明眼人中都有利于视觉参考，而先天性盲人也经常提及听觉。相比之下，在“物体”任务中进行的感知编码和工作记忆以相似的方式在所有组中增强了对触觉的感觉参考。这些结果削弱了失明中言语主义的影响，并在一定程度上支持了这样一种观点，即先天性盲人的感知体验在某种程度上反映在他们的认知中。
