Adults Can Be Trained to Acquire Synesthetic Experiences

Bor, Daniel; Rothen, Nicolas; Schwartzman, David J.; Clayton, Stephanie; Seth, Anil K. (2014). Adults Can Be Trained to Acquire Synesthetic Experiences. Scientific Reports, 4(7089), p. 7089. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/srep07089

Preview

Text srep07089.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA). Download (601kB) | Preview

Synesthesia is a condition where presentation of one perceptual class consistently evokes additional experiences in different perceptual categories. Synesthesia is widely considered a congenital condition, although an alternative view is that it is underpinned by repeated exposure to combined perceptual features at key developmental stages. Here we explore the potential for repeated associative learning to shape and engender synesthetic experiences. Non-synesthetic adult participants engaged in an extensive training regime that involved adaptive memory and reading tasks, designed to reinforce 13 specific letter-color associations. Following training, subjects exhibited a range of standard behavioral and physiological markers for grapheme-color synesthesia; crucially, most also described perceiving color experiences for achromatic letters, inside and outside the lab, where such experiences are usually considered the hallmark of genuine synesthetes. Collectively our results are consistent with developmental accounts of synesthesia and illuminate a previously unsuspected potential for new learning to shape perceptual experience, even in adulthood.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

249 since deposited on 24 Feb 2016
23 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item