Sensory Substitution From and Ecological Perspective

Abstract

Sensory substitution enables individuals to compensate for the absence of a sensory modality by engaging alternative perceptual systems. From an ecological psychology perspective, sensory substitution devices facilitate perception and action by providing access to environmental information, particularly for individuals with sensory impairments. In this chapter, we present a conceptualization of sensory substitution from this ecological perspective, offering a framework for the development of special-purpose devices. Grounded in the principles of environmental scaling, perception-action coupling, and affordance perception (Richardson et al., 2008), we argue that various lines of research in ecological sensory substitution have demonstrated empirical improvements, revealing new possibilities in clinical, experimental, and theoretical domains.