Article,
The perceptual reality of synesthetic colors
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99 (6): 4127--31 (March 2002)
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.022049399
Abstract
Synesthesia is a remarkable, rare condition where an individual has
multimodal perceptual experiences from a unimodal sensory event.
We have studied such an individual, an adult male for whom achromatic
words and alphanumeric characters are seen in vivid, reliable colors.
We used a variety of perceptual tasks to document the perceptual
reality of synesthetic colors and to begin to localize the stage
of visual processing where this anomalous binding of externally specified
form and internally generated color may take place. Synesthetic colors
were elicited by forms defined solely by binocular cues or solely
by motion cues, which implies a central locus of visual processing
for synesthetic binding of form and color. Also included among our
measurements was a difficult visual search task on which non-synesthetic
subjects required an effortful search through the visual display.
Our subject, in contrast to non-synesthetic subjects, accomplished
the task with relative ease because the target of the search had
a different synesthetic color from the distractors. Thus, synesthetic
experiences appear to originate from a binding of color and form
that takes place within central stages of visual processing.
Tags
- adult,color
- disorders,perceptual
- disorders:
- perception,color
- perception,form
- perception,motion
- perception:
- physiology,cues,form
- physiology,humans,language,male,motion
- physiology,perceptual
- physiopathology,photic
- stimulation
