Multimodally encoded spatial images in sighted and blind

视力正常和盲人的多模态编码空间图像

• 批准号: 7372421
• 负责人: NICHOLAS A GIUDICE
• 金额: $ 33.2万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-01 至 2011-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7372421
• 关键词: Alzheimer' s Disease; Anterior; Attention; Auditory; Auditory Perception; Back; Behavior; Behavioral Paradigm; Brain Injuries; Characteristics; Classification; Cognition; Cognitive; Complex; Cutaneous; Disease; Distance Perception; Environment; Eye; Face; Feeling; Hand; Head; Hearing; Horns; Human; Image; Imagination; Individual; Investigation; Joystick; Judgment; Knowledge; Laboratories; Language; Lead; Learning; Life; Location; Logic; Masks; Memory; Modality; Nature; Navigation System; Paper; Perception; Performance; Play; Population; Positioning Attribute; Process; Property; Publishing; Reaction Time; Relative (related person); Reporting; Research; Research Personnel; Retrieval; Self-Help Devices; Sensory; Short-Term Memory; Source; Sports; Stimulus; Testing; Touch sensation; Update; Variant; Vision; Visual; Visually Impaired Persons; Visuospatial; Walking; Work; Workload; base; blind; experience; feeding; haptics; improved; long term memory; research study; retinal rods; sight for the blind; sound; theories; virtual reality

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research investigates a representation of spatial layout that serves to guide action in the absence of direct perceptual support. We call this representation a "spatial image." Humans can perceive surrounding space through vision, hearing, and touch. Environmental objects and locations are internally represented by modality-specific "percepts" that exist as long as they are supported by concurrent sensory stimulation from vision, hearing, and touch. When such stimulation ceases, as when the eyes close or a sound source is turned off, the percepts also cease. A spatial image, however, continues to exist in the absence of the percept. For example, when one views an object and then closes the eyes, one experiences the continued presence of the object at its perceptually designated location. Although the phenomenological properties of the spatial image are known only to the observer, functional characteristics of spatial images can be revealed through systematic investigation of the behavior of the observer on a spatial task like spatial updating. For example, the observer might try to walk blindly to the location of a previously viewed object along any of a variety of paths. A sizeable body of research indicates that people have an impressive ability to do so. An important property of spatial images is that they function equivalently in many cases, despite variations in the input sensory modality. In previous work, the PI's have shown that distinct input modalities, like vision and audition, induce equivalent performance on a variety of spatial tasks. Perhaps even more surprising, spatially descriptive language was found to produce spatial images that are functionally equivalent, or nearly so, as revealed by performance on spatial tasks. Our hypothesis is that the different spatial modalities of vision, touch, hearing, and language all feed into a common amodal representation. Spatial images can also be created by retrieving information about spatial layout from long-term memory. Importantly, blind individuals are able to perform many spatial tasks because spatial images are not restricted to the visual modality. Although most of our understanding of spatial images comes from laboratory experiments that seem unrepresentative of everyday life, it is important to realize the pervasiveness of spatial images in the lives of sighted and blind people. For both populations, there are many circumstance where maintaining a spatial image of the immediately surrounding environment (e.g., working at the office, playing sports) allows individuals to rapidly redirect their activity to objects without having to re-initiate search for them. This leads to fluency of action with minimal effort. Our proposed research will further our knowledge about spatial images produced by visual, haptic, auditory, and language input as well as those activated by retrieval of spatial information from long-term memory. Our research consists of theoretically-based experiments involving sighted and blind subjects. All of the experiments rely on logic to make inferences about internal processes and representations from observed behavior, such as verbal report, joystick manipulation, and more complex spatial actions, like reaching, pointing, and walking. Our experiments are grouped into 3 topics. The first topic is concerned with establishing further properties of spatial images. Four of the five experiments under this topic are concerned with whether touch and vision produce spatial images that are functionally similar; the fifth will investigate possible interference between spatial images from perception and those from long-term memory. The five experiments within the second topic exploit different paradigms and logic for testing whether spatial images from different sensory modalities are amodal (retaining no information about the encoding modality) or modality-specific (retaining information about the encoding modality). The third topic is concerned with whether spatial images are equally precise in all directions around the head, in contrast to visual images which are thought to be of high precision only when located in front of head. The primary significance of this research will be the expansion of knowledge of multimodal spatial images, which so far have received very little scientific attention in comparison with visual images, about which hundreds of scientific papers have been published. This knowledge will further our understanding of the extent to which spatial cognition is similar in sighted and blind people. This knowledge will also be useful for researchers and technologists who are developing assistive technology, including navigation systems, for blind and visually impaired people. More generally, this knowledge will lead to improved tests of spatial cognition that will be useful in better understanding the deficits in knowledge and behavior resulting from diseases, such as Alzheimer's, and brain damage.

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的研究调查的空间布局，用于指导行动的直接知觉支持的情况下表示。我们称这种表现为“空间图像”。“人类可以通过视觉、听觉和触觉感知周围的空间。环境对象和位置在内部由特定于模态的“感知”表示，只要它们受到来自视觉、听觉和触觉的并发感官刺激的支持，它们就存在。当这种刺激停止时，比如当眼睛闭上或声源关闭时，感知也停止了。然而，一个空间的形象，继续存在，在缺乏的记忆。例如，当一个人观看一个物体然后闭上眼睛时，一个人在其感知指定的位置处体验到该物体的持续存在。虽然空间意象的现象学性质只有观察者知道，但空间意象的功能特征可以通过系统地研究观察者在空间任务（如空间更新）上的行为来揭示。例如，观察者可能试图沿着各种路径中的任何一条盲目地走到先前观察到的对象的位置。大量研究表明，人们有令人印象深刻的能力这样做。空间图像的一个重要特性是，尽管输入的感觉模态不同，但在许多情况下，它们的功能是等同的。在以前的工作中，PI的已经表明，不同的输入方式，如视觉和听觉，诱导各种空间任务的等效性能。也许更令人惊讶的是，空间描述性语言被发现可以产生功能上等效或几乎等效的空间图像，正如空间任务的表现所揭示的那样。我们的假设是，视觉、触觉、听觉和语言的不同空间形态都进入了一个共同的非模态表征。空间图像也可以通过从长期记忆中检索有关空间布局的信息来创建。重要的是，盲人能够执行许多空间任务，因为空间图像不限于视觉模态。虽然我们对空间图像的理解大多来自于实验室实验，这些实验似乎并不代表日常生活，但重要的是要认识到空间图像在视力正常的人和盲人生活中的普遍性。对于这两个群体，存在许多情况，其中维持直接周围环境的空间图像（例如，在办公室工作、进行体育运动）允许个人快速地将他们的活动重定向到对象，而不必重新发起对它们的搜索。这导致流畅的行动与最小的努力。我们的研究将进一步加深我们对视觉、触觉、听觉和语言输入所产生的空间图像以及从长期记忆中提取空间信息所激活的空间图像的认识。我们的研究包括以理论为基础的实验，涉及视力正常和失明的受试者。所有的实验都依赖于逻辑来从观察到的行为中推断内部过程和表征，例如口头报告，操纵操纵杆操作，以及更复杂的空间动作，如伸手，指点和行走。我们的实验分为三个主题。第一个主题是关于建立空间图像的进一步属性。在这个主题下的五个实验中，有四个涉及触觉和视觉是否产生功能相似的空间图像;第五个实验将研究感知空间图像和长期记忆空间图像之间可能的干扰。第二个主题中的五个实验利用不同的范式和逻辑来测试来自不同感觉模态的空间图像是否是无模态的（保留关于编码模态的信息）或模态特定的（保留关于编码模态的信息）。第三个主题是空间图像是否在头部周围的所有方向上都同样精确，而视觉图像被认为只有在头部前方才具有高精度。这项研究的主要意义将是扩展多模态空间图像的知识，与视觉图像相比，到目前为止，这方面的科学关注很少，已经发表了数百篇科学论文。这些知识将进一步加深我们对盲人和盲人的空间认知相似程度的理解。这一知识也将有助于研究人员和技术人员为盲人和视力受损者开发辅助技术，包括导航系统。更一般地说，这些知识将导致空间认知测试的改进，这将有助于更好地理解阿尔茨海默氏症和脑损伤等疾病导致的知识和行为缺陷。