The Developmental Significance of Cross-Modal Matching

Abstract

Philosophers and psychologists have sometimes argued that traditional distinctions between the spatial senses and, for that matter, between afferent sensory perception and efferent motor control are arbitrary and unhelpful (e.g., Bornstein, 1936; Freedman, 1968; von Hornbostel, 1927). Conceptual and experimental isolation of visual, auditory, and somesthetic processes (ultimately based upon Muller's so-called "law of specific nervous energies") led, undoubtedly, to a tremendous increase in knowledge of peripheral sensory physiology and to more or less detailed descriptions of sensory pathways to the central nervous system. Yet such work seemed to imply that human beings and other creatures see, hear, feel, and so on as isolated independent acts, as though individuals could only be known to each other as distinct independent visual, auditory, and sentient persons. Moreover ordinary language does not make the distinctions between modality dimensions which any treatment of, say, sight, hearing, and touch as isolated and distinct ways of knowing the world would seem to require. (Ordinary language is in fact shot through with synesthetic comparisons. See, e.g., Marks, 1975, for a recent discussion of synesthesia.) Of course, knowledge is perceptually based, but it is not obvious that it is visually based or (pace Berkeley) tactually based.