Following on from ecological theories of perception, such as the one proposed by [Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin] this paper reviews the literature on the multisensory interactions underlying the perception of flavor in order to determine the extent to which it is really appropriate to consider flavor perception as a distinct perceptual system. We propose that the multisensory perception of flavor may be indicative of the fact that the taxonomy currently used to define our senses is simply not appropriate. According to the view outlined here, the act of eating allows the different qualities of foodstuffs to be combined into unified percepts; and flavor can be used as a term to describe the combination of tastes, smells, trigeminal, and tactile sensations as well as the visual and auditory cues, that we perceive when tasting food.
The sense of touch is one of the central forms of perceptualexperience, though it has often been overshadowed by vision in both philosophy and psychology. Thought to be one of the first senses to develop, touch occursacross the whole body using a variety of receptors in the skin. Itoften combines these signals with feedback from the muscles and tendons as we actively move andexplore the world, and with proprioceptive information about the position of our tactual surfaces. These unique features of touch raise manyinteresting philosophical issues. In particular, it is a central topic of discussion in debates about themultisensory nature of perception, the relation between perception andaction, and the connection between touch and bodily awareness.
The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems Gibson Pdf
In addition to its own constituent systems, touch interacts withother modalities in interesting ways. This is important in the historyof philosophy especially because the most discussed interaction, orpotential interaction, concerned the connection between touch andvision. Both senses bring information about shape and size andlocation, but they seem to do so in very different ways. The centralquestion has long been the nature and strength of thesedifferences.
Extended touch, or awareness of distal objects and features througha cane or other tool, can be used to argue for a related but distinctview of the relation between perceptual touch and bodily awareness(Fulkerson 2012). That we experience through touch objects andfeatures located some distance from the body raises questions aboutthe mediating role of bodily awareness. Given the nature of extendedtouch, it seems implausible to hold that there is anything like amatching of the contents of perceptual touch (or the features madeavailable through touch) with the content or features involved in thebodily awareness. Instead, perceptual touch seems to depend on bodilyawareness informationally. The idea is that both bodilyawareness (proprioception and kinesthesis especially) anddiscriminative touch make use of the very same sensoryinputs. Perceptual touch is the result of extracting distalinformation from the more proximal bodily information, for use bydedicated downstream systems (cf. Serino and Haggard 2010). Since allperceptual touch will be the result of such extraction, there willalways be bodily information available for awareness. 2ff7e9595c
Comments