Cross-modal Perception in Kirundi

Languages do not always use specific perception words to refer to specific senses. A word from one sense can metaphorically express another physical perception meaning. For Kirundi, findings from a corpus-based analysis revealed a cross-modal polysemy and a bidirectional hierarchy between higher and lower senses. The attested multisensory expression of auditory verb kwûmva ‘hear’ allows us to reduce sense modalities to two –vision and audition. Moreover, the auditory experience verb kwûmva ‘hear’ shows that lower senses can extend to higher senses through the use of synaesthetic metaphor (e.g. kwûmva akamōto ‘lit:hear a smell’/ururírīmbo ruryōshé ‘lit: a tasty song’/ururirimbo ruhimbâye ‘lit: a pleasant song). However, in collocations involving emotion words, it connects perception to emotion (e.g.; kwûmva inzara ‘lit: hear hunger’, kwûmva umunêzēro ‘lit: hear happiness’). This association indicates that perception in Kirundi gets information from both internal and external stimuli. Thus, considering feelings as part of the perception system.

The Impact of Synchronized Tactile Stimulation on Joint Attention in 11-Month-Old Infants

Infants explore the world through many combinations of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. A recent theory known as the “intersensory redundancy hypothesis” posits that the temporal overlap of stimulation across different sense modalities drives selective attention in infancy. Social communication typically involves visual, auditory and tactile cues for infants. Although infrequently studied, rhythmic touch is thought to be inherently rewarding; if manipulated within a social context, it may be able to reinforce joint attention. Given that joint attention is fundamental to the development of social communication, this study investigated the convergent effects of visual, auditory and tactile cues on the expression of joint attention in 10 infants between 11 to 12 months of age. The addition of synchronized (but not asynchronous) tactile stimulation to natural communication cues was associated with higher performance on a joint attention measure (i.e. more frequent responses to parental requests). Implications for autism are discussed.

The Impact of Synchronized Tactile Stimulation on Joint Attention in 11-Month-Old Infants

Infants explore the world through many combinations of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. A recent theory known as the “intersensory redundancy hypothesis” posits that the temporal overlap of stimulation across different sense modalities drives selective attention in infancy. Social communication typically involves visual, auditory and tactile cues for infants. Although infrequently studied, rhythmic touch is thought to be inherently rewarding; if manipulated within a social context, it may be able to reinforce joint attention. Given that joint attention is fundamental to the development of social communication, this study investigated the convergent effects of visual, auditory and tactile cues on the expression of joint attention in 10 infants between 11 to 12 months of age. The addition of synchronized (but not asynchronous) tactile stimulation to natural communication cues was associated with higher performance on a joint attention measure (i.e. more frequent responses to parental requests). Implications for autism are discussed.

Gentle House: Co-designing with an autistic perception

This article discusses the early phases of Gentle House, a spatial design research project that works with concepts of autistic perception and a collaborative design process to renovate the home of a family of four. The family includes a ten-year-old autistic child who is currently being educated via correspondence schooling. In working alongside the family and understanding the uniqueness and complexity of their needs, the goal is to create spaces that are stimulating and enjoyable for them to live in. The autistic child’s experience of the physical world is pathologised as sensory processing disorder. This is a condition where there are differences in the integration of sense modalities that can lead to moments of being overwhelmed by some stimulus and a more highly tuned receptivity to other stimuli, such as texture and smell. This design research rejects a pathological framework for characterising these experiences and uses co-design approaches with the aim of learning from his engagement with the world. In particular, his highly tuned awareness of phenomena that ‘neurotypical’ perception tends to tune out or overlook. The larger implication of this project and approach is a rethinking of our living and working environments towards sensorially richer and more inclusive ends. The early phases of the project have involved a series of spatial, material, and sensory design prototypes, which are discussed in terms of their co-creation and the perceptual richness of space-time experiences. The design knowledge gleaned from these prototypes is briefly contextualised within existing frameworks for inclusive design, before outlining future trajectories for the research.

Feeling Ulysses

This chapter challenges approaches to reading that rely on “scopic dominance” (here referred to as Cyclopean) and suggests that Ulysses, in particular, rewards readers who feel with, through, and about bodies—human and textual. The chapter proposes an approach to reading that produces an affective: one that moves us and that we move, one that we encounter with our living bodies. The sense modalities of sight and touch are used to illustrate Joyce’s broader approach to senses, perception, and epistemological questions more broadly. To read Ulysses “feelingly” is to engage the senses together with the emotions in the act of reading. Such readings cultivate a multi-perspectival proximity to the content, context, and language of the work. Affect theory provides a useful way of reconceiving the reading self: as porous, responsive, and part of an ever-unfolding process of being in relation with the world. This essay stages an encounter between text and reader that is designed to show readers how to feel their way through the text in a way that allows reading to become more reciprocal or mutual. The value of such an approach is that it makes it easier for a reader to be touched, and perhaps altered, in return.

The relation between sensory loss and communicative and cognitive development in children with congenital deafblindness

People with congenital deafblindness (CDB) are a heterogenic group, and CDB is defined in a variety of ways in the scientific literature. In this study, we aim to examine whether some of the heterogeneity may be more easily resolved from the perspective of ability than from the perspective of impairment. In order to do this, we take as a starting point for our investigations the communication systems that are used and the different sense modalities they require. Information about almost the entire known population of children with CDB in Denmark (age = 3–18 years, N = 71) was collected using a questionnaire form, covering degree of visual and hearing impairments, intellectual disability, level of expressive communication and use of communication systems. No correlation was found between severity of CDB based on degree of sensory impairment and level of intellectual and communicative disability within the population. However, whether or not the child with CDB was able to make use of residual senses to access a linguistic culture (spoken or signed) correlated significantly with both cognitive and communicative ability. In addition, the two groups had inverse correlations between number of systems used for communication and communicative ability. The actual systems used for communication may be useful for categorizing people with CDB into severity subgroups for scientific study and for intervention planning. In addition, the acquisition of a tactile language for the subgroup of people with CDB who do not utilize a visual or auditory linguistic culture should be given special attention in research and practice.

Phantasia - the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes

Visual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mind’s eye. It plays a role in memory, day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe the absence and abundance of visual imagery, we have been contacted by many thousands of people with extreme imagery abilities. Questionnaire data from 2000 participants with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia indicate that aphantasia is associated with scientific and mathematical occupations, whereas hyperphantasia is associated with ‘creative’ professions. Participants with aphantasia report an elevated rate of difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory, whereas participants with hyperphantasia report an elevated rate of synaesthesia. Around half those with aphantasia describe an absence of wakeful imagery in all sense modalities, while a majority dream visually. Aphantasia appears to run within families more often than would be expected by chance. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia appear to be widespread but neglected features of human experience with informative psychological associations.

The Problem with Trusting Unfamiliar Faculties

According to accessibilism, there is an accessibility condition on justification. More specifically, accessibilism claims that facts about justification are a priori accessible—where a priori is used in the traditional sense that a condition is a priori just in case it doesn’t depend on any of the sense modalities. The most prominent argument for accessibilism draws on BonJour and Lehrer's unfamiliar faculty scenarios. Recently, however, several objections have been raised against it. In this article, I defend the argument against three prominent objections from the recent literature.

Modalization of movement: The problem of sensus communis and the limits of phenomenology

One of the most persistent problems in accounting for the constitution of subjective experience is the question of the unity of consciousness. In the phenomenological tradition this question is often approached through concepts such as ipseity, pre-reflective consciousness, ownership, and first-person perspective. Since Aristotle, the question of unity in an experiencing subject has been associated with the notion of “common sensibles” and the concept of “ sensus communis” as that which joins the proper sense modalities in a single center. In this article it is argued that both the classical and the phenomenological solutions to the problem of unity point to the central challenge of how to account for the experience of movement and it is questioned whether a phenomenology of movement gets us closer to an understanding of sensus communis as a primordial relational force in the body–world formation.

The Mechanism of the Ordinal Position Effect: Stability Across Sense Modalities and the Hands Crossed Context

The ordinal position effect posits that items positioned earlier in an ordinal sequence are responded to faster with the left key than the right key, and items positioned later in an ordinal sequence are responded to faster with the right key than the left key. Although the mechanism of the ordinal position effect has been investigated in many studies, it is unclear whether the ordinal position effect can extend to the auditory modality and the hands crossed context. Therefore, the present study employed days as the order information to investigate this question. Days were visually or acoustically displayed on a screen in random order, and participants were instructed to judge whether the probe day they perceived was before or after the current day (days-relevant task) or to identify the color or voice of the probe day they perceived (days-irrelevant task). The results indicate the following: (a) The days before the current day were responded to faster with the left key than the right key, and the days after the current day were responded to faster with the right key than the left key, both when the days-relevant task and the days-irrelevant task were performed, regardless of the sense modality. (b) The ordinal position effect for judgments of days was also obtained in the auditory modality even when the hands were crossed. These results indicate that the ordinal position effect can extend to the auditory modality and the hands crossed context, similar to the spatial-numerical association of response codes effect of numbers.