Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2010 Apr 7;277(1684):1021-6. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1765. Epub 2009 Dec 9.
For people with synaesthesia letters and numbers may evoke experiences of colour. It has been previously demonstrated that these synaesthetes may be better at detecting a triangle made of 2s among a background of 5s if they perceive 5 and 2 as having different synaesthetic colours. However, other studies using this task (or tasks based on the same principle) have failed to replicate the effect or have suggested alternative explanations of the effect. In this study, we repeat the original study on a larger group of synaesthetes (n = 36) and include, for the first time, an assessment of their self-reported colour experiences. We show that synaesthetes do have a general advantage over controls on this task. However, many synaesthetes report no colour experiences at all during the task. Synaesthetes who do report colour typically experience around one third of the graphemes in the display as coloured. This is more consistent with theories of synaesthesia in which spatial attention needs to be deployed to graphemes for conscious colour experiences to emerge than the interpretation based on 'pop-out'.
对于患有联觉症的人来说，字母和数字可能会引发颜色体验。此前已经证明，如果联觉者将 5 和 2 感知为具有不同的联觉颜色，那么他们可能更善于在背景为 5 的情况下检测由 2s 组成的三角形。然而，其他使用此任务（或基于相同原理的任务）的研究未能复制该效果，或者提出了该效果的替代解释。在这项研究中，我们在更大的联觉者群体（n=36）中重复了原始研究，并首次包括了他们自我报告的颜色体验评估。我们表明，联觉者在这项任务上确实比对照组有优势。然而，许多联觉者在任务过程中根本没有任何颜色体验。那些报告有颜色体验的联觉者通常将显示中的大约三分之一的字符感知为有色。这与联觉理论更为一致，即需要将空间注意力分配到字符上，才能出现有意识的颜色体验，而不是基于“突出”的解释。
