Schwenkler John
Department of Philosophy, Bradley Hall, Mount St. Mary's University, 16300 Old Emmitsburg Road, Emmitsburg, MD 21727 USA; email:
Iperception. 2012;3(3):186-8. doi: 10.1068/i0525ic. Epub 2012 Apr 17.
How do we recognize identities between seen shapes and felt ones? Is this due to associative learning, or intrinsic connections these sensory modalities? We can address this question by testing the capacities of newly sighted subjects to match seen and felt shapes, but only if the subjects can see the objects well enough to form adequate visual representations of their shapes. In light of this, a recent study by R. Held and colleagues fails to demonstrate that their newly sighted subjects' inability to match seen and felt shape was due to a lack of intermodal connections rather than a purely visual deficit, as the subjects may not have been able visually to represent 3D shape in the perspective-invariant manner required for intermodal matching. However, the study could be modified in any of several ways to help avoid this problem.
我们如何识别所见形状与所感形状之间的一致性？这是由于联想学习，还是这些感觉模态之间的内在联系？我们可以通过测试新获得视力的受试者匹配所见形状和所感形状的能力来解决这个问题，但前提是受试者能够清楚地看到物体，以便形成其形状的适当视觉表征。鉴于此，R. Held及其同事最近的一项研究未能证明他们新获得视力的受试者无法匹配所见形状和所感形状是由于缺乏多模态联系，而不是纯粹的视觉缺陷，因为受试者可能无法以多模态匹配所需的视角不变方式在视觉上表征三维形状。然而，该研究可以通过几种方式中的任何一种进行修改，以帮助避免这个问题。
