Department of Medical Neurobiology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hadassah Ein-Kerem, Jerusalem, Israel; The Baruch Ivcher Institute For Brain, Cognition & Technology, The Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzeliya, Israel; Center of Advanced Technologies in Rehabilitation (CATR), Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel.
The Cognitive Science Program, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Cognition. 2021 Jul;212:104716. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104716. Epub 2021 Apr 23.
Geometrical intuitions spontaneously drive visuo-spatial reasoning in human adults, children and animals. Is their emergence intrinsically linked to visual experience, or does it reflect a core property of cognition shared across sensory modalities? To address this question, we tested the sensitivity of blind-from-birth adults to geometrical-invariants using a haptic deviant-figure detection task. Blind participants spontaneously used many geometric concepts such as parallelism, right angles and geometrical shapes to detect intruders in haptic displays, but experienced difficulties with symmetry and complex spatial transformations. Across items, their performance was highly correlated with that of sighted adults performing the same task in touch (blindfolded) and in vision, as well as with the performances of uneducated preschoolers and Amazonian adults. Our results support the existence of an amodal core-system of geometry that arises independently of visual experience. However, performance at selecting geometric intruders was generally higher in the visual compared to the haptic modality, suggesting that sensory-specific spatial experience may play a role in refining the properties of this core-system of geometry.
几何直觉自发地驱动人类成人、儿童和动物的视空间推理。它们的出现是否与视觉经验内在相关，还是反映了跨感觉模式共享的认知的核心属性？为了解决这个问题，我们使用触觉变体检测任务测试了天生失明的成年人对几何不变量的敏感性。盲参与者自发地使用许多几何概念，如平行、直角和几何形状，以在触觉显示器中检测入侵者，但在对称性和复杂的空间转换方面遇到困难。在各个项目中，他们的表现与在触摸（蒙住眼睛）和视觉中执行相同任务的视力正常成年人以及未受过教育的学龄前儿童和亚马逊成年人的表现高度相关。我们的结果支持存在一个与视觉经验无关的非模态核心几何系统。然而，与触觉模式相比，在视觉模式下选择几何入侵者的表现通常更高，这表明感官特定的空间经验可能在完善这种核心几何系统的属性方面发挥作用。
