Sensory Substitution and the Transparency of Visual Experience
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Sensory substitution devices make use of information in one sensory modality to deliver information usually provided by another. But when information usually presented visually is presented to a subject in an auditory or haptic way, is the resulting experience in any sense visual? Or does sensory substitution show that dimensions of experience—about the spatial layout of objects and properties in the environment—that were previously taken to be essentially visual can be experienced in other modalities too? I will consider this question by looking at whether a property such as the transparency of visual experience can be transferred to, and enhance, experience in other modalities.Keywords:
Sensory Substitution
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Substitution (logic)
Abstract : Even though vision is only one modality humans use to interact with their environment, most people consider it to be the most important. Hearing also is viewed as necessary for interpreting environmental stimuli. In contrast, touch, smell, and taste are largely ignored as being essential to humans' interaction with the environment. The brain seldom processes environmental information sequentially using successive sensory modalities; rather, it simultaneously processes stimuli from several or all of the sensory modalities. Because humans have a limited capacity to receive, hold in working memory, and cognitively process information taken from the environment, the use of one sensory modality to convey information within a system can overload that modality. Multimodal systems can help to alleviate overload for any one modality, and such systems have been favorable in showing that the touch or tactile modality can be used as an independent input modality to convey information to the user, or as a redundant modality to increase information prominence of the visual and auditory modalities. The purpose of this review, which reflects work that occurred before mid-2006, is to discuss the tactile modality, specifically measures of tactile sensitivity for the human body, capabilities and limitations of the tactile modality, and applications of human tactile interfaces. Compared to other areas of the body, tactile research for the head and interfaces for the head is sparse. Therefore, a secondary concern of this review is to highlight this gap in the tactile literature.
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Sensory Substitution
Tactile stimuli
Sensory stimulation therapy
Tactile Perception
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Tactile sensor
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There has been considerable effort devoted towards understanding sensory substitution devices in terms of their relationship to canonical sensory modalities. The approach taken in this essay is rather different, although complementary, in that we seek to define a broad conceptual space of ‘sensory tools’ in which sensory substitution devices can be situated. Such devices range from telescopes, to cochlear implants, to attempts to create a magnetic sense. One feature of these devices is that they operate at the level of ‘raw’ sensory information. As such, systems such as Braille which operate at a symbolic/conceptual level do not count as a sensory tool (or a sensory substitution device) and nor would a device such as CCTV which, although capturing raw sensory information, would not meet a conventional definition of a tool. With this approach, we hope to avoid the circularity inherent in previous attempts at defining sensory substitution and provide a better starting point to explore the effects of sensory tools, more generally, on the functioning of the nervous system.
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Substitution (logic)
Braille
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Sensory Substitution
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Various modes of sensory feedback to the user have the potential to enhance performance in robot-assisted surgery. In this paper, it is hypothesized that substituting or augmenting force feedback by visual representation of the force levels can potentially assist the user in limiting the amount of applied forces. In addition to confirming the above for a telemanipulated suturing task, the results indicate that there is a trade-off between the magnitudes of applied forces and the time required, to complete the task.
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Visual, auditory, and tactile reaction time (RT) signals were used in an a-reaction task. The main independent variable was the predictability of signal modality, which was varied by cuing the relevant modality or modalities before each trial. The response requirement was nondiscriminative with respect to modality. Three experiments showed that (a) RT's were longer when signal modality was uncertain, the more so with three possible modalities than with two; (b) this effect of uncertainty was approximately the same whether varied within subjects or between subjects; and (C) the effect of uncertainty was somewhat smaller on tactile RTs than on visual or auditory RTs. Experiment 4 examined change in this uncertainty effect with practice. The uncertainty effect declined over 11 daily sessions to the point of virtual absence from auditory and tactile RTs but was restored or increase will respect to all three signals following one session of discrimination RTs ("respond if visual, refrain if auditory or tactile"). The results are interpreted as showing that attention can be allocated to sensory modalities and that the implied selective process is concerned with modality "identification," though not in a way consistent with a channel-switching model thereof.
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Sensory substitution refers to the use of one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) to supply environmental information normally gathered by another sense (e.g., vision) while still preserving some of the key functions of the original sense. For example, the use of auditory signals might give information about visual scenes. The development of sensory substitution devices has profoundly changed the classical definition of sensory modalities and contributed to the emergence of a form of “artificial synaesthesia”. In the last decade, our knowledge about cognitive and brain mechanisms involved in sensory substitution has grown considerably bringing new insights into human perception and neural plasticity. Thanks to technological advances and scientific achievements, sensory substitution has become a real alternative for restoring some functions of a defective sensory organ (e.g., sight in case of blindness or hearing in the case of deafness). This paper addresses some of the major questions raised by sensory substitution, demonstrates how the study of sensory substitution enhances our understanding of human perception and brain plasticity and provides an overview of rehabilitation potentialities.
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Sensory substitution devices aim at compensating sensory deficits by converting stimuli coming from a deficient sensory modality (e.g., vision) into stimuli accessible through another modality (e.g., touch or audition). Studies conducted with these devices revealed the central nervous system to be very plastic. Various laboratories have conducted studies investigating such plasticity by means of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques. At the ISIR Laboratory, we focused on the factors underlying the learning of sensory substitution devices, their adequacy to the target population, and we explored ways of improving their design by the use of crossmodal correspondences and by taking into account individual differences in the used reference frames. We also investigated the nature of the experience with sensory substitution. In particular, we suggested moving beyond positions reducing experience to that of a single sensory modality. Rather, sensory substitution is considered as a multisensory experience, involving not only visual, but also auditory or tactile processes as well as cognitive processes. In this framework, individual differences do have an influence on the extent to which the different sensory modalities influence the experience with the devices.
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Sensory substitution devices make use of information in one sensory modality to deliver information usually provided by another. But when information usually presented visually is presented to a subject in an auditory or haptic way, is the resulting experience in any sense visual? Or does sensory substitution show that dimensions of experience—about the spatial layout of objects and properties in the environment—that were previously taken to be essentially visual can be experienced in other modalities too? I will consider this question by looking at whether a property such as the transparency of visual experience can be transferred to, and enhance, experience in other modalities.
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Modality (human–computer interaction)
Substitution (logic)
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Sensory Substitution
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Artificial vision
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Sensory substitution refers to the use of one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) to supply environmental information normally gathered by another sense (e.g., vision) while still preserving some of the key functions of the original sense. For example, the use of auditory signals might give information about visual scenes. The development of sensory substitution devices has profoundly changed the classical definition of sensory modalities and contributed to the emergence of a form of
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