Stimulus Modality

In BrainMap (2009) this term very clearly means "the sensory mechanism through which the subject was stimulated. That is, what was used to stimulate one of their five senses while they were in the scanner?" It has nothing to do with the quality of the perceived stimulus to the subject, and maps to the CogPO relationship activates_sensory_system.

Comments

A single stimulus may have multiple stimulus modalities.

Stimulus modality was first considered to be identical to the sensory system activated by the stimulus--obviously, light activates the visual system and the sensory system codes it as having the visual modality, auditory tones activate the auditory system and have the auditory modality, etc. It seemed one to one, so why have the redundancy?

However, in cognitive psychology, "stimulus modality" or sensory modality refers to a quality or dimension of the internal perception of the stimulus. I.e. perceived sound by a regular person has the auditory modality; perceived sound in a sound-color synaesthete might have both the auditory and visual modalities. In order to avoid hijacking that term, and to avoid modeling interior qualia whenever possible, we note the distinction in CogPO and annotate experimental stimuli as "activating_sensory_system(X)" activates_sensory_system.