Categories of Perceptual Experience: A Psychophysicist Peruses Synesthetic Metaphors

Abstract

Abstract Many dimensions of perceptual experience — such as loudness, pitch, brightness, and color — become the bases for conceptual categories about experience. Some of these dimensions — intensity, brightness, and size, for instance — are suprasensory, applying to several modalities. Suprasensory dimensions provide the materials on the one hand for synesthetic (cross-modal) connections in perception, and on the other for synesthetic metaphors in language. To assess psychophysicaly the comprehension of synesthetic metaphors, we asked people to make quantitative judgments of the meanings of expressions that combine words or phrases describing visual auditory experiences. It turns out that children as well as adults understand visual-auditory metaphors; the judgments of meaning show systematic translations between brightness and loudness and between brightness and pitch. The comprehension of synesthetic metaphors follows rules that mimic those of synesthetic perception, an outcome supporting the view that categories of synesthetic perception and synesthetic metaphor derive in common from suprasensory dimensions of experience.