1 Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Medical School.
2 Division of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Mar;28(3):263-275. doi: 10.1177/0956797616677313. Epub 2017 Jan 1.
Nonarbitrary mappings between sound and shape (i.e., the bouba-kiki effect) have been shown across different cultures and early in development; however, the level of processing at which this effect arises remains unclear. Here we show that the mapping occurs prior to conscious awareness of the visual stimuli. Under continuous flash suppression, congruent stimuli (e.g., "kiki" inside an angular shape) broke through to conscious awareness faster than incongruent stimuli. This was true even when we trained people to pair unfamiliar letters with auditory word forms, a result showing that the effect was driven by the phonology, not the visual features, of the letters. Furthermore, visibility thresholds of the shapes decreased when they were preceded by a congruent auditory word form in a masking paradigm. Taken together, our results suggest that sound-shape mapping can occur automatically prior to conscious awareness of visual shapes, and that sensory congruence facilitates conscious awareness of a stimulus being present.
在不同文化和发展早期都表现出声音和形状之间的非任意映射（即bouba-kiki 效应）；然而，这种效应出现的处理水平尚不清楚。在这里，我们表明这种映射发生在对视觉刺激有意识之前。在连续闪光抑制下，一致的刺激（例如，在角形内部的“kiki”）比不一致的刺激更快地突破到意识中。即使我们训练人们将不熟悉的字母与听觉单词形式配对，结果也表明这种效果是由字母的语音而不是视觉特征驱动的。此外，在掩蔽范式中，当形状前面有一个一致的听觉单词形式时，形状的可见性阈值会降低。总之，我们的结果表明，声音形状映射可以在对视觉形状有意识之前自动发生，并且感觉一致有助于意识到存在刺激。
