No abstract
A quarter of a century ago, in the preface to « Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution », Paul Bach y Rita wrote: "This monograph thus risks becoming outdated in a very short time since the development of refined sensory substitution systems should allow many of the question raised here to be answered, and some of the conclusions may appear naive to future readers." (BACH Y RITA, 1972) As it turns out, this prediction is far from having been fulfilled: in spite of their scientific and social interest, their real effectiveness and a certain technological development, prosthetic devices employing the principle of "sensory substitution" are not widely used by the blind persons for whom they were originally destined. After a brief recall of the general principle of sensory substitution, we will advance several hypotheses to account for this situation. We will then identify some elements which may favour the conception and, especially, the usability of future devices. To this end, we will focus our analysis on the work of Bach-y-Rita, particularly well documented, devoted to TVSS (Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution) since the 1960's. This choice is motivated by the extensive and exemplary nature of this research, devoted to the rehabilitation of a handicapped population, as an enterprise which is both technical and scientific in character. We will also present the specific interest of substitution systems employing tactile stimulation, and we will emphasize the essential coordination of fundamental and technological research in this area. In addition, besides their direct utility for handicapped persons, these devices open broad experimental and theoretical perspectives on cognition in general (brain plasticity, perception,
In order to design a ''haptic zoom'', in this fundamental study, we compare two scaling methods by focusing on the strategies adopted by subjects who are using a sensory substitution device. Method 1 consists of a reduction of the sensor size and of its displacement speed. Speed reduction is obtained by a ''human'' movement adjustment (hand speed reduction). Method 2 consists of a straightforward increase in the dimensions of the image. The experimental device used couples a pen on a graphics tablet with tactile sensory stimulators. These are activated when the sensor impinges on the outline of the figure on the computer screen. This virtual sensor (a square matrix composed of 16 elementary fields) moves when the pen, guided by human hand movements, moves on the graphics tablet. The results show that the recognition rate is closely dependent on the size of the figure, and that the strategies used by the subjects are more suitable for method 2 than for method 1. In fact, half of the subjects found that method 1 inhibited their movements, and the majority of them did not feel the scaling effect, whereas this was clearly felt in method 2.
A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social. This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. ContributorsRenaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson Bradford Books imprint
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