Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do we need to reflect on our own perceptual experiences to understand what another person is seeing/hearing? Sighted(n=18) and congenitally blind (n=18) participants listened to scenarios describing sighted or blind observers looking at orhearing another person (target). Participants rated the likelihood that observers would know features of the target (e.g., age,gender, eye/hair color). We manipulated distance of observer from the target (nearby versus far) and duration of perceptualexperience (extended versus brief). Blind and sighted groups agreed on features easiest to discern (e.g. hair easier than eyecolor), although blind participants judgments about vision were more variable. Both groups judged nearby and extendedperception more likely to result in knowing. For seeing experiences, blind participants judgments were more influenced byduration, whereas sighted participants by distance. Linguistic communication is sufficient for discovering basic variablesgoverning perception (i.e., distance, duration), but first-person experience calibrates weighting of the variables.