Public understanding & perception of sensory experience & scientific understanding: Even in a sample with fairly high educational attainment, many respondents were unaware of fairly common forms of sensory variation

Cuskley, Christine, and Charalampos Saitis. 2020. “What Do People Know About the Senses? Understanding Perceptions of Variation in Sensory Experience.” PsyArXiv. August 28. doi:10.31234/osf.io/ghcxv

Abstract: Academic disciplines spanning cognitive science, art, and music have made strides in understanding how humans sense and experience the world. We now have a better scientific understanding of how human sensation and perception function both in the brain and in interaction than ever before. However, there is little research on how this high level scientific understanding is translated into knowledge for the public more widely. We present descriptive results from a simple survey and compare how public understanding and perception of sensory experience lines up with scientific understanding. Results show that even in a sample with fairly high educational attainment, many respondents were unaware of fairly common forms of sensory variation. In line with the well-documented under representation of sign languages within linguistics, respondents tended to under-estimate the number of sign languages in the world. We outline how our results represent gaps in public understanding of sensory variation, and argue that filling these gaps can form an important early intervention, acting as a basic foundation for improving acceptance, inclusivity, and accessibility for cognitively diverse populations.