Percepcja krosmodalna

Cross-modal perception is “the capacity to abstract andexchange information between different sensory mo -dalities” (Davenport et al. 1973). One aspect of the crossmodalityof perception is the occurrence among peopleof certain natural and universal mappings of certainstimulus features in one modality into stimulus featuresin another modality (e.g. high-pitched sounds areassociated with bright light, as well as with jaggedshapes; words containing the vowel a are connected withbigger objects, those containing i with smaller ones).Synaesthesia is a special case of cross-modal perception.It is a condition in which stimulation in one sensorymodality gives rise to a sensation in a different modality,or in the same modality but involving different qualitiesof the stimulus (Sagiv 2005). Two major theories havebeen proposed to explain synaesthesia: 1) failure ofneural pruning resulting in cross-activation betweensome brain regions which in a non-synaesthetic brainare not strongly connected, and 2) weakened inhibitionof feedback from certain brain regions, which interfereswith the processing of information of a particular kind.