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Grapheme-colour synaesthesia improves detection of embedded shapes, but without pre-attentive "pop-out" of synaesthetic colour

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 18:22 authored by Jamie WardJamie Ward, Clare Jonas, Zoltan DienesZoltan Dienes, Anil SethAnil Seth
For people with synaesthesia letters and numbers may evoke experiences of colour. It has been previously demonstrated that these synaesthetes may be better at detecting a triangle made of 2s among a background of 5s if they perceive 5 and 2 as having different synaesthetic colours. However, other studies using this task (or tasks based on the same principle) have failed to replicate the effect or have suggested alternative explanations of the effect. In this study, we repeat the original study on a larger group of synaesthetes (n = 36) and include, for the first time, an assessment of their self-reported colour experiences. We show that synaesthetes do have a general advantage over controls on this task. However, many synaesthetes report no colour experiences at all during the task. Synaesthetes who do report colour typically experience around one third of the graphemes in the display as coloured. This is more consistent with theories of synaesthesia in which spatial attention needs to be deployed to graphemes for conscious colour experiences to emerge than the interpretation based on 'pop-out'.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Proceedings B: Biological Sciences

ISSN

1471-2954

Publisher

Royal Society, The

Issue

1684

Volume

277

Page range

1021-1026

Pages

6.0

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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