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.
• There is evidence of synesthesia being learned from environmental influences
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
