Priming letters by colors: evidence for the bidirectionality of grapheme-color synesthesia.

Full Abstract

In synesthesia, stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a percept in another nonstimulated modality, for example, graphemes trigger an additional color percept in grapheme-color synesthesia, which encompasses the variants letter-color and digit-color synesthesia. Until recently, it was assumed that synesthesia occurs strictly unidirectional: Although the perception of a letter induces a color percept in letter-color synesthetes, they typically do not report that colors trigger the percept of a letter. Recent data on number processing in synesthesia suggest, however, that colors can implicitly elicit numerical representations in digit-color synesthetes, thereby questioning unidirectional models of synesthesia. Using a word fragment completion paradigm in 10 letter-color synesthetes, we show here for the first time that colors can implicitly influence lexical search. Our data provide strong support for a bidirectional nature of grapheme-color synesthesia and, in general, may allude to the mechanisms of cross-modality interactions in the human brain.

Author information

Author/s: Weiss, Peter H (PH); Kalckert, Andreas (A); Fink, Gereon R (GR);

Affiliation: Research Center Jülich, Germany. P.H.Weiss(-atsign-)fz-juelich.de

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of cognitive neuroscience (J Cogn Neurosci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Oct; vol 21 (issue 10) : pp 2019-26

Dates: Created 2009/08/24; Completed 2009/10/29;

PMID: 19016601, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/29/2009, IMS Date: )

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