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FB Kolloq 24: Thomas Alrik Sørensen

„Through the looking glass - How expertise shape perception”

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Prof. Dr. Thomas Alrik Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
„Through the looking glass - How expertise shape perception”

Synaesthesia is a condition that affects a subset of the population, who experi-ence consistent perceptual (or conceptual) deviations in one or more sensory domains, e.g., graphemes that elicit a colour sensation. While previous re-search has tried to link the phenomenon to various disorders, like autism, we believe that synaesthesia represents an example of the individual variation in cognitive and perceptual strategies that the brain builds in an interaction with environment. In this talk I will highlight some of our research on both exper-tise and synaesthesia to argue how the brain constructs perceptual and concep-tual strategies that provides the basis for individual differences. The conse-quence of this suggestion is that individual differences may be much larger than people usually assume. Additionally, some deviations like developmental prosopagnosia may simply reflect this variation in perceptual analysis, rather than being a disorder.