School of Psychology and Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
Cognition. 2013 May;127(2):230-4. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.12.012. Epub 2013 Mar 1.
People with grapheme-colour synaesthesia have been shown to have enhanced memory on a range of tasks using both stimuli that induce synaesthesia (e.g. words) and, more surprisingly, stimuli that do not (e.g. certain abstract visual stimuli). This study examines the latter by using multi-featured stimuli consisting of shape, colour and location conjunctions (e.g. shape A+colour A+location A; shape B+colour B+location B) presented in a recognition memory paradigm. This enables distractor items to be created in which one of these features is 'unbound' with respect to the others (e.g. shape A+colour B+location A; shape A+colour A+location C). Synaesthetes had higher recognition rates suggesting an enhanced ability to bind certain visual features together into memory. Importantly, synaesthetes' false alarm rates were lower only when colour was the unbound feature, not shape or location. We suggest that synaesthetes are "colour experts" and that enhanced perception can lead to enhanced memory in very specific ways; but, not for instance, an enhanced ability to form associations per se. The results support contemporary models that propose a continuum between perception and memory.
具有文字-颜色联觉的人在使用各种刺激物（例如单词）以及更令人惊讶的非联觉刺激物（例如某些抽象视觉刺激物）进行一系列任务时，其记忆力都得到了增强。本研究通过使用由形状、颜色和位置结合而成的多特征刺激物（例如形状 A+颜色 A+位置 A；形状 B+颜色 B+位置 B），在识别记忆范式中检查了后者。这使得可以创建分心项，其中一个特征相对于其他特征“未绑定”（例如形状 A+颜色 B+位置 A；形状 A+颜色 A+位置 C）。联觉者的识别率更高，这表明他们能够将某些视觉特征更有效地绑定到记忆中。重要的是，只有当颜色是未绑定的特征时，联觉者的错误警报率才会降低，而不是形状或位置。我们认为联觉者是“颜色专家”，增强的感知能力可以以非常特定的方式增强记忆；但例如，不会增强形成联想的能力本身。这些结果支持了当代模型，该模型提出了感知和记忆之间的连续体。
