Petra Stoerig - Do Blindness and Sensory Substitution Impact Object Knowledge?

Our knowledge of objects is largely derived through our senses. The visual one is of particular importance because it allows us to gain information about complex scenes and silent objects we cannot explore tactually. Blindness prevents this immediate access, and sensory substitution attempts to (re-)establish it by transforming visual images into a format that an intact sensory modality can process. We use an image-to-sound converting system to learn whether blind and blindfolded subjects learn to interpret the sound patterns representing geometric shapes and objects. The talk will present data on categorization and identification performance, and discuss the impact of blindness and sensory substitution-based perceptual learning on object representation.