Do we see the same red? New qualia structure paradigm measures shared sensory experiences

A team of psychologists, bioengineers and neurologists from The University of Tokyo and Monash University in Australia has tested the possibility of using a qualia structure paradigm to understand whether sensory experiences are intersubjectively equivalent. Their paper is published in the journal iScience.

Psychologists, neurologists and many others have debated the likelihood of unique sensory experiences for many years. For some, it has come down to asking a simple question such as “Do two people experience the same color red?” There is no way to answer the question due to the personalized nature of sensory perception. In this new effort, the researchers acknowledge that there is no way to prove that two people perceive sensory experiences equivalently, but suggest there is a way to demonstrate likelihood using what they describe as a qualia structure paradigm.

Qualia, they explain, is a term developed to describe a particular type of experience, such as when a person is asked “what is it like for you to…?” To find out if similarities between answers to such questions exist, the researchers asked volunteers to rate the similarity of 93 colors based on their own unique perception of them and then compared their answers among all the volunteers. To ensure complete independence, one step in the experiment involved using colors without labels.

The research team found striking similarities between the volunteers in their perception of a given color compared to other colors. This adds credence to theories suggesting that most people probably have the same sensory experience when looking at a given color. They also suggest the same might be true for people who have the same type of color blindness. They acknowledge that their experiment did not prove that people see the same things when looking at different colors, just that it shows that they probably do.

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