Witthoft and Winawer (2006)

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Current revision as of 02:44, 29 April 2008

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

Results

EXPERIMENT 1- CONSISTANCY OVER TIME

• AED completed task in 15 minutes on each test

• Fulfills criteria for this measure of synesthesia

• Hues of individual letter from both tests were highly correlated

• Saturation and brightness were more variable

EXPERIMENT 2- TRANSFER TO CYRILLIC

• Significant correlations for hue and saturation but not brightness were found

• Near perfect correlation for hue with Cyrillic letters that have phonetic similarity to English letters but not for saturation or brightness

EXPERIMENT 3- LEVEL OF REPRESENTATION OF THE INDUCER

• Importance of visual similarity of upper to lowercase letters on saturation and brightness was looked at

• No significant effects for brightness were found

• Main effect for case and font in English letters; uppercase letters were more saturated than lowercase letters and times new roman was more saturated than cursive.

• The main effect for Cyrillic letters were much greater in uppercase letters than lowercase letters, and only for the Cyrillic letters that are visually similar to the English counterparts.

• The times new roman font led to more saturation than the cursive font. This could be due to the fact that the refrigerator magnets were more similar to times new roman.

EXPERIEMNT 4- LEVEL OF REPRESENTATION IN THE CONCURRENT

• Examine if the concurrent synesthesia is affected by a lightness constancy illusion.

• Achromatic letters appear embedded in one of the two lightness illusions checker-shadow or snakes illusion.

• AED showed a highly significant effect in both the checker-shadow and snakes illusions, which demonstrates that her concurrent synesthesia occurs before computing lightness in visual processing.

Discussion

• DNA may be a predictor for synesthesia, but it does not determine the acquisition of synesthesia. As Withoft and Winawer (2006) display in their experiment, synesthesia can be learned from early childhood experiences with environmental stimuli such as colored refrigerator magnets.

See also: Synesthesia