Perceptual constancy with a novel sensory skill.

Abstract

Making sense of the world requires perceptual constancy—the stable perception of an object across changes in one's sensation of it. To investigate whether constancy is intrinsic to perception, we tested whether humans can learn a form of constancy that is unique to a novel sensory skill (here, the perception of objects through click-based echolocation). Participants judged whether two echoes were different either because: (a) the clicks were different, or (b) the objects were different. For differences carried through spectral changes (but not level changes), blind expert echolocators spontaneously showed a high constancy ability (mean d′ = 1.91) compared to sighted and blind people new to echolocation (mean d′ = 0.69). Crucially, sighted controls improved rapidly in this ability through training, suggesting that constancy emerges in a domain with which the perceiver has no prior experience. This provides strong evidence that constancy is intrinsic to human perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Public Significance Statement—This study shows that people who learn a new skill to sense their environment - here: listening to sound echoes - can correctly represent the physical properties of objects. This result has implications for effectively rehabilitating people with sensory loss. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)