Exploring the functional nature of synaesthetic colour: Dissociations from colour perception and imagery.

ABSTRACT: Individuals with grapheme-colour synaesthesia experience anomalous colours when reading achromatic text. These unusual experiences have been said to resemble 'normal' colour perception or colour imagery, but studying the nature of synaesthesia remains difficult. In the present study, we report novel evidence that synaesthetic colour impacts conscious vision in a way that is different from both colour perception and imagery. Presenting 'normal' colour prior to binocular rivalry induces a location-dependent suppressive bias reflecting local habituation. By contrast, a grapheme that evokes synaesthetic colour induces a facilitatory bias reflecting priming that is not constrained to the inducing grapheme's location. This priming does not occur in non-synaesthetes and does not result from respo

SUBMITTER: Chiou R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6092315 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature