Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Br J Psychol. 2019 Nov;110(4):727-744. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12363. Epub 2018 Nov 28.
The aim of the present study was to test the relationship between different types of synaesthesia and their involvement in art, creative, and visual abilities. We tested 20 grapheme-colour, 18 sound-colour, 19 grapheme-colour-and-sound-colour, 20 sequence-space synaesthetes, and the same number of controls matched by age, gender, and education. We assessed the number of artistic professions, involvement in art, and the performance in psychometric tests of divergent and convergent creativity, as well as visual and visuo-spatial abilities. Results show a higher prevalence of artists among synaesthetes, especially sound-colour synaesthetes. Sound-colour synaesthetes also showed a higher involvement in artistic activities overall while sequence-space synaesthetes showed higher involvement in visual art. Only grapheme-colour-and-sound-colour synaesthetes showed significantly higher divergent creativity compared to matched controls. Additionally, overall, synaesthetes scored higher in visuo-spatial abilities (i.e., mental rotation). For synaesthetes and controls, visuo-spatial abilities correlated with divergent creativity. We discuss that synaesthetes' higher involvement in art is not necessarily reflected in their basic creative abilities.
本研究旨在测试不同类型的联觉与艺术、创意和视觉能力之间的关系。我们测试了 20 名图形-颜色联觉者、18 名声音-颜色联觉者、19 名图形-颜色-声音联觉者、20 名序列-空间联觉者，以及年龄、性别和教育程度相匹配的相同数量的对照组。我们评估了艺术职业的数量、对艺术的参与程度以及发散和聚合创造力的心理测量测试的表现，以及视觉和视空间能力。结果表明，联觉者中艺术家的比例较高，尤其是声音-颜色联觉者。声音-颜色联觉者总体上表现出更高的艺术参与度，而序列-空间联觉者表现出更高的视觉艺术参与度。只有图形-颜色-声音联觉者的发散创造力明显高于匹配对照组。此外，总体而言，联觉者在视空间能力（即心理旋转）方面得分更高。对于联觉者和对照组，视空间能力与发散创造力相关。我们讨论了联觉者对艺术的更高参与度不一定反映在他们的基本创造力上。
