Witthoft and Winawer (2006)
From Psy3241
Contents |
Synesthetic Colors Detirmined by Having Colored Refrigerator Magnets in Childhood
Presentation by: Mandy French
Introduction
• Inducer- stimulus that produces synesthesia
• Concurrent- the synesthesia itself
• The relationship between inducer and concurrent arises from pre-existing mappings between sensory areas that are overactive or fail to be pruned during development.
• One theory suggests that all infants are innately synesthetic with sensory differentiation only coming with development and the pruning of connections. Another theory indicates that synesthesia is learned through particular inducer and concurrent pairings from sensory information in the environment.
Main Study
• Participant AED: grapheme (letter in alphabet)-color synesthesia
• Colors were learned from refrigerator magnets
• Moved to Russia at age 3, so synesthesia transferred to the Russian alphabet, Cyrillic
• Reports all achromatic, or non-color, text as having colors overlaid on the surfaces of letter or numbers
• Colors influenced by Cyrillic letters were determined by their visual or phonetic similarity to English letters
• Wanted to show that AED’s synesthesia colors are based on ordinary lightness constancy mechanisms
