Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Aug;22(8):1067-72. doi: 10.1177/0956797611416250. Epub 2011 Jul 19.
Early development is characterized by a period of exuberant neural connectivity followed by a retraction and reweighting of connections over the course of development. It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and that is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. We provide the first evidence for this infant-synaesthesia hypothesis by showing that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical 2- and 3-month-olds, but not in 8-month-olds or adults. These results are consistent with the possibility that exuberant neural connectivity facilitates synaesthetic associations during infancy that are typically eliminated during development, but that a failure of the retraction process leads in rare cases to synaesthesia in adults.
早期发展的特点是在发育过程中经历一段神经连接的旺盛期，然后是连接的回缩和重新加权。有人提出，这种连接可能有助于婴儿体验到与典型成年人不同的任意感觉体验，但与联觉者的感觉体验相似，联觉是一种罕见的感觉现象，与过度的神经连接有关，其特征是不同感觉之间存在强烈的任意关联。我们通过证明特定形状的存在会影响典型的 2 至 3 个月大婴儿对颜色的偏好，但不会影响 8 个月大婴儿或成年人对颜色的偏好，为这个婴儿联觉假说提供了第一个证据。这些结果与以下可能性一致：过度的神经连接在婴儿期促进了联觉关联，这些关联通常在发育过程中被消除，但在罕见情况下，回缩过程的失败会导致成年人出现联觉。
