title: When blue is larger than red: colors influence numerical cognition in synesthesia.
abstract: In synesthesia, certain stimuli ("inducers") may give rise to perceptual experience in additional modalities not normally associated with them ("concurrent"). For example, color-grapheme synesthetes automatically perceive achromatic numbers as colored (e.g., 7 is turquoise). Although synesthetes know when a given color matches the one evoked by a certain number, colors do not automatically give rise to any sort of number experience. The behavioral consequences of synesthesia have been documented using Stroop-like paradigms, usually using color judgments. Owing to the unidirectional nature of the synesthetic experience, little has been done to obtain performance measures that could indicate whether bidirectional cross-activation occurs in synesthesia. Here it is shown that colors do implicitly evoke numerical magnitudes in color-grapheme synesthetes, but not in nonsynesthetic participants. It is proposed that bidirectional coactivation of brain areas is responsible for the links between color and magnitude processing in color-grapheme synesthesia and that unidirectional models of synesthesia might have to be revised.
authors.affiliation: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. roico@bgu.ac.il
authors.forename: Roi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cohen Kadosh
authors.forename: Noam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sagiv
authors.forename: David E J
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Linden
authors.forename: Lynn C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Robertson
authors.forename: Gali
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Elinger
authors.forename: Avishai
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Henik
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology