The Department of Cognitive and Brain Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Philosophy Program, Graduate Center, City University of New York New York, NY, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jan 16;5:1. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00001. eCollection 2014.
Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) could be constructed relying on olfactory perceptible properties and the olfactory mental qualities then defined by appeal to that QS of olfactory perceptible properties. We also consider how to delimit the olfactory QS from other modalities. We further apply QST to the role that experience plays in refining our olfactory discriminative abilities and the occurrence of olfactory mental qualities in non-conscious olfactory states. QST is shown to be fully applicable to and useful for understanding the complex domain of olfaction.
质量-空间理论（QST）通过诉诸于感知在知觉状态中的作用来解释心理特质的本质。QST 通常是根据与颜色有关的心理特质来描述的。在这里，我们将 QST 应用于嗅觉模态。嗅觉在各个方面比视觉更为复杂，因此为 QST 提供了一个有用的测试案例。为了确定 QST 是否能够应对嗅觉带来的挑战，我们展示了如何构建一个质量空间（QS），该空间依赖于嗅觉可感知的特性，并通过诉诸于该嗅觉可感知特性的 QS 来定义嗅觉心理特质。我们还考虑了如何将嗅觉 QS 与其他模态区分开来。我们进一步将 QST 应用于经验在完善我们的嗅觉辨别能力中的作用，以及嗅觉心理特质在非意识嗅觉状态中的出现。QST 被证明完全适用于并有助于理解嗅觉这一复杂领域。
