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.
• Word-taste synesthesia involves the semantics and phonology of speech influence the relationship between inducer and concurrent. The phoneme K tends to elicit the taste of foods with the same phoneme (cake).
Main Study
• The participant AED has color grapheme synesthesia where the letters of the alphabet had colors 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.
• Transfer from English to Cyrillic letters showed consistency in color when there were phonemic or visual similarities.
Methods
• Testing was done on 2 separate occasions, 21 days apart.
• Graphemes appeared in Grey and AED adjusted the hue, brightness and saturation by using controls on the screen. There were 360 possible hues, 100 levels of saturation and 128 levels of brightness.
• Consistency was measured by individually correlating the hue, brightness and saturation of each letter.
• Each matching session (unlimited time) consisted of the digits 0-9 and all letters of the alphabet, both upper and lowercase, were presented in random order
