Aims:

• the question about what synaesthesia can tell us about the interaction of senses should allow you to develop thoughts about the basic organisation of the perceptual system: how the divide between senses relates to the physical properties of the world and biological properties of the nervous system…
• it also offers you an opportunity to investigate the intriguing phenomenon of synaesthesia that has attracted much attention in recent years and hints at clues into the links between the senses.

Context

The topic relates to the very interesting phenomenon of synaesthesia that makes us re-examine basic notions that we take for granted such as sound gives rise to hearing. It also allows you to consider what you have learned so far in the course about the separate systems and realise that the approach implicitly suggests that these separate systems are processed in different modules. Yet for synaesthetes strong interactions are taking place and the question asks you to consider what this can tell us about interactions between senses in the rest of the population. This will involve comparing the synaesthetic experience with evidence of more "everyday" multisensory interactions.

And here you can download your essay instruction sheet...

What to do

Don’t worry, you don’t need to answer all of these questions, a 2000 word essay certainly can only scratch the surface. At some point you will need to describe what synaesthesia is and why it might be interesting. You will also need to describe the modular aspect of coding for the senses in the cortex and why there needs to be interaction between the senses. What are the main questions that arise from the need to combine senses? - consider how synaesthesia might shed some light on these. At the end, you should write a summary paragraph to evaluate the question what (if anything) we can learn from synaesthesia about the interaction of senses. Extra points to consider - what are the methodological issues involved in studying synaesthesia and how does this affect you answer; do all senses interact with each other and how does synaesthesia help answer this...

Have fun!

The "Ventriloquist effect" Seeing only Orville's beak move gives the impression that the he is making the sound, not Keith, whose lips are still. This an example of the interaction between sound and vision we all experience.

Sources

The basic framework is covered in the lecture on the 1st of December, and can be found on the lecture webpage (you should also use what you have learned about modularity of senses from other lectures, you can look at the webpages for the other lectures).

Starting from the lecture material, the best way forward is to read Chapter 1 from Stein & Meredith 'The merging of the senses' and the part from Chapter 5 from Gazzaniga et al. 'Cognitive Neuroscience' suggested below and browse Goldstein’s ‘Sensation and Perception’ for more specific information about individual sensory modalities. A deeper understanding of some of the topics can be derived from reading some of the texts listed below. Feel free to find your own, but be careful to avoid overly detailed technical issues.

Reading materials (core texts in library, mastercopies available from resources room):

• Gazzaniga, M. S.: Cognitive neuroscience: the biology of the mind Chapter 5 Pages 199-205 This is a brief chapter on the interaction of the senses and synaesthesia.
• Zanker (2010) Sensation, Perception, Action - an evolutionary perspective. Palgrave. (152.1 ZAN)
• Stein, B. E. & Meredith M. A. (1993) The merging of the senses. Cambridge, Mass: MIT (First chapter available from virtual resources room by clicking here) This is a review of what we know about the senses interacting.

Further reading(available from resources room, library or internet):

• Kolb, B., Whishaw, I. Q. (2004) An introduction to brain and behavior Chapter 14 Page 564 This is a page on synaesthesia and a link to these webpages:

http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/

http://www.syn.sussex.ac.uk/

• Sagiv, N. & Ward, J. (2006) Cross-modal interactions: Lessons from synesthesia. Progress in brain research. 155 263-275 (click here to download from virtual resources room) Quite a heavy-going article that has a lot to say related to the essay question, but be careful to try and find the relevant parts and not get lost in the detail

• Shimojo S., Shams L. (2001) Sensory modalities are not separate modalities: plasticity and interactions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 11(4), pp. 505-509

• Simner J, Mulvenna C, Sagiv N, Tsakanikos E, Witherby SA, Fraser C, Scott K, Ward J (2006) Synaesthesia: The prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences. Perception 35, pp. 1024-1033

• Macaluso, E. & Driver, J. (2005) Multisensory spatial interactions: a window onto functional integration in the human brain. Trends in Neurosciences 28:654-271. Again this is quite a heavy-going review of brain imaging evidence for multisensory integration in humans, but contains some useful definitions

A note on Plagiarism

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back to course outline
last update 21-11-2011
Szonya Durant & Johannes Zanker