Orange Is Less Than Green: An Examination of Bidirectionality in Grapheme-Color Synesthesia

作者：Drew Stefanie A; Awad Jasmine F; Hackney Brandon C; Fenn Elise

来源：Perception, 2018, 47(8): 881-891.

DOI：10.1177/0301006618779485

• bidirectionality
• color
• grapheme-color
• synesthesia

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience a sense of color when viewing graphemes (e.g., digits and letters). Traditionally, these synesthetic perceptions are considered to be unidirectional, where viewing a grapheme elicits a nonveridical sensation of color, but viewing a color does not induce a reciprocal sense of a grapheme. A growing body of research has emerged that suggests the potential for bidirectional percepts, wherein color facilitates additional grapheme perception. We present here a novel paradigm in which we presented two sets of pure color patches, based on synesthete's reported colors, side-by-side and asked participants to indicate the color patch with the greater affiliated magnitude. Results indicated that the odds of answering correctly on trials were significantly greater for synesthetes (80.2% accuracy) than nonsynesthetes (52.1% accuracy). These results are aligned with other reports that support the notion of inducing a sense of magnitude from color in synesthetes. These findings challenge the traditional model of synesthesia as a unidirectional phenomenon and have implications of the neuronal communications that underlie perception in general.

• 出版日期2018-8