Palmeri Thomas J, Blake Randolph, Marois Rene, Flanery Marci A, Whetsell William
Department of Psychology, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, and Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Mar 19;99(6):4127-31. doi: 10.1073/pnas.022049399.
Synesthesia is a remarkable, rare condition where an individual has multimodal perceptual experiences from a unimodal sensory event. We have studied such an individual, an adult male for whom achromatic words and alphanumeric characters are seen in vivid, reliable colors. We used a variety of perceptual tasks to document the perceptual reality of synesthetic colors and to begin to localize the stage of visual processing where this anomalous binding of externally specified form and internally generated color may take place. Synesthetic colors were elicited by forms defined solely by binocular cues or solely by motion cues, which implies a central locus of visual processing for synesthetic binding of form and color. Also included among our measurements was a difficult visual search task on which non-synesthetic subjects required an effortful search through the visual display. Our subject, in contrast to non-synesthetic subjects, accomplished the task with relative ease because the target of the search had a different synesthetic color from the distractors. Thus, synesthetic experiences appear to originate from a binding of color and form that takes place within central stages of visual processing.
联觉是一种显著且罕见的状况，即个体从单峰感觉事件中获得多峰感知体验。我们研究了这样一个人，一名成年男性，他能看到无色的单词和字母数字呈现出生动、可靠的颜色。我们使用了各种感知任务来记录联觉颜色的感知现实，并开始确定视觉处理阶段，在这个阶段可能会发生外部指定形式与内部生成颜色的这种异常结合。联觉颜色由仅由双眼线索或仅由运动线索定义的形式引发，这意味着形式和颜色的联觉结合在视觉处理的中枢位置。我们的测量还包括一项困难的视觉搜索任务，非联觉受试者在该任务中需要费力地在视觉显示中搜索。相比之下，我们的受试者完成这项任务相对轻松，因为搜索目标与干扰项有不同的联觉颜色。因此，联觉体验似乎源于在视觉处理中枢阶段发生的颜色和形式的结合。
