Aix Marseille Univ, Inserm, INS, Inst Neurosci Syst, Marseille, France.
Caylar, Villebon-sur-Yvette, France.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jul 20;11(1):14762. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94133-4.
Sensory substitution devices aim at restoring visual functions by converting visual information into auditory or tactile stimuli. Although these devices show promise in the range of behavioral abilities they allow, the processes underlying their use remain underspecified. In particular, while an initial debate focused on the visual versus auditory or tactile nature of sensory substitution, since over a decade, the idea that it reflects a mixture of both has emerged. In order to investigate behaviorally the extent to which visual and auditory processes are involved, participants completed a Stroop-like crossmodal interference paradigm before and after being trained with a conversion device which translates visual images into sounds. In addition, participants' auditory abilities and their phenomenologies were measured. Our study revealed that, after training, when asked to identify sounds, processes shared with vision were involved, as participants' performance in sound identification was influenced by the simultaneously presented visual distractors. In addition, participants' performance during training and their associated phenomenology depended on their auditory abilities, revealing that processing finds its roots in the input sensory modality. Our results pave the way for improving the design and learning of these devices by taking into account inter-individual differences in auditory and visual perceptual strategies.
感觉替代设备旨在通过将视觉信息转换为听觉或触觉刺激来恢复视觉功能。尽管这些设备在其允许的行为能力范围内显示出了前景，但它们的使用背后的过程仍然没有明确说明。特别是，虽然最初的争论集中在感觉替代的视觉与听觉或触觉性质上，但自十多年来，出现了这样一种观点，即它反映了两者的混合。为了从行为上研究涉及视觉和听觉过程的程度，参与者在使用将视觉图像转换为声音的转换设备进行训练之前和之后完成了类似于 Stroop 的跨模态干扰范式。此外，还测量了参与者的听觉能力和他们的现象学。我们的研究表明，在训练后，当被要求识别声音时，涉及与视觉共享的过程，因为参与者在声音识别中的表现受到同时呈现的视觉干扰的影响。此外，参与者在训练期间的表现及其相关现象学取决于他们的听觉能力，这表明处理过程源于输入的感觉模态。我们的研究结果为通过考虑个体在听觉和视觉感知策略方面的差异，为这些设备的设计和学习提供了新的思路。
