Palmeri et al. (2002)
From Psy3242
Participant
Participant was WO, an adult male who has experienced lexical synesthesia since early childhood. WO's mother, maternal grandfather and maternal great uncle all experienced synethesia.Lexical synesthesia is when achromatic words (black, white, grey) and numbers reliably appear colored. During synesthesia there is a binding of color to visual forms.
Procedure
First,Palmeri et al (2002) tested WO's color associations with a list of 100 common monosyllabic words. He was tested twice; the sessions were separated by more than a month. WO was 97 percent consistent across the two trials. Then the researchers tested WO's synesthesia elicited by local and global forms. For instance, out of small 2s the researchers made a 5. The synethesia person could either see the small 2s (local) or the large 5(global). In synesthesia from motion-defined stimuli, WO was able to identify the digit and saw the associated color for each of the digits. In synesthesia from binocularly defined stimuli, Palmeri et al. (2002) created individual digits by using random-dot stereograms, the digit was visible because of the disparity between the dots using 3D red/green glasses. Results from the stroop interference was significantly slowed for WO when the ink colors were incongruent with the synesthetic colors. In tests were WO had to pick out a 2 in a number of 5s, WO was able to pick out the 2 because it "popped out" to him. But when WO had to pick out the 8 among 6s, WO had a harder time because the synesthetic color for 6s and 8s was a similar blusih color. One conclusion from this paper is that "binding in lexical synethesia occurs during central visual processing and not during later more conceptual processing" (Palmeri et al, 4130). The results were consistent with previous research by Similek et al. and Ramachandran and Hubbard.
