Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events

Crossmodal transfer of perceptual learning: Evidence from the recognition of first and second language characters in young children.

“…Using a letter or digit recognition/classification task this study showed that 5–6-year-old children who learned those shapes mostly visually were able to recognize/classify them, in both Bangla and English, by touch. This finding makes an important contribution to the recent theory of crossmodal plasticity (a theory put forward by the first author of this work and other colleagues; Karim et al, 2021a), suggesting that crossmodal transferability of ecologically valid shapes develops, in the first few years of life, much earlier than the development of crossmodal integration capacity.…”

“…This fact is popularly known as modality-invariant or amodal representations of sensory information (Erdogan et al, 2015; Yildirim & Jacobs, 2013, 2015). Three principles have been put forward to account for these amodal representations (Karim et al, 2021a). One principle is that the detection of shape invariants across different sensory modalities is a fundamental innate characteristic of a human's perceptual–cognitive system, available without the need for learned correlations (e.g., Meltzoff & Borton, 1979).…”

“…Finally, according to the third principle, the role of neuromodular reorganization operating through multimodal training (without the involvement of touch) on the formation of visual-tactile association cannot be denied. There is evidence that training in a particular task can exert significant changes on the functional architecture of the brain (Carmel & Carrasco, 2008; Karim et al, 2021a; Kelly & Garavan, 2005; Poldrack, 2000; Sasaki et al, 2010). This suggests that the acquisition of letters or digits through sensory training in natural settings can influence brain activity through various mechanisms, including a reorganization or redistribution of neural activity within and across neural networks, within and across sensory modalities (see Karim et al, 2021a).…”

“…One important finding is that children were able to recognize or classify the (mostly) visually acquired letters and digits, in both Bangla and English, not only by vision but by touch as well, indicating an early transfer of learned skills from vision to touch. This transfer is explained by two theoretical principles (see above) which state that the human brain has an innate or acquired capacity to encode abstract representations amodally (e.g., Erdogan et al, 2015; Karim et al, 2021a; Yildirim & Jacobs, 2013, 2015). A second important finding is that the letter or digit recognition performance was strikingly greater in the visual than the tactile modality, with a completely reversed pattern of recognition time.…”

“…However, the association may develop not only between the used (experienced) sensory modalities but between the used and unused modalities as well, such as between vision and touch. The former form of crossmodal association has been studied and well documented in a plethora of past studies (for a comprehensive review, see Karim et al, 2021a). The present study intends to offer new insight into crossmodality by examining the latter form of crossmodal association to which little attention has been paid thus far.…”