Training grapheme-colour associations produces a synaesthetic Stroop effect, but not a conditioned synaesthetic response.
The goal of this study was to investigate whether behavioural and physiological consequences of synaesthesia can be elicited by training specific letter-colour associations. Towards this goal 20 non-synaesthetic individuals were trained for 10 min on 7 consecutive days to associate four different letters with four specific colours. After training, we administered the synaesthetic Stroop test and the synaesthetic conditioning test. The results showed that a 1-week letter-colour association-training was sufficient to elicit a synaesthetic Stroop effect. In contrast, there was no evidence for a conditioned synaesthetic response as measured by skin conductance response in the synaesthetic conditioning test. These results indicate that the presence of a synaesthetic Stroop effect is not unique to true synaesthetes. We discuss methodological, experiential, and neuronal reasons for the dissociation between the synaesthetic Stroop test and the synaesthetic conditioning test.
University of Bern, Switzerland. beat.meier@psy.unibe.ch
Beat
B
Meier
Nicolas
N
Rothen
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult