Ignoring Irrelevant Information: Enhanced Intermodal Attention in Synaesthetes.

Anna Mas-Casadesús,Elena Gherri

doi:10.1163/22134808-00002566

Abstract

Despite the fact that synaesthetes experience additional percepts during their inducer-concurrent associations that are often unrelated or irrelevant to their daily activities, they appear to be relatively unaffected by this potentially distracting information. This might suggest that synaesthetes are particularly good at ignoring irrelevant perceptual information coming from different sensory modalities. To investigate this hypothesis, the performance of a group of synaesthetes was compared to that of a matched non-synaesthete group in two different conflict tasks aimed at assessing participants' abilities to ignore irrelevant information. In order to match the sensory modality of the task-irrelevant distractors (vision) with participants' synaesthetic attentional filtering experience, we tested only synaesthetes experiencing at least one synaesthesia subtype triggering visual concurrents (e.g., grapheme-colour synaesthesia or sequence-space synaesthesia). Synaesthetes and controls performed a classic flanker task (FT) and a visuo-tactile cross-modal congruency task (CCT) in which they had to attend to tactile targets while ignoring visual distractors. While no differences were observed between synaesthetes and controls in the FT, synaesthetes showed reduced interference by the irrelevant distractors of the CCT. These findings provide the first direct evidence that synaesthetes might be more efficient than non-synaesthetes at dissociating conflicting information from different sensory modalities when the irrelevant modality correlates with their synaesthetic concurrent modality (here vision).

Highlights

People tend to associate some properties in one sensory modality to those in another modality, a phenomenon called crossmodal correspondences
We examined the role of a phonetic property of Mandarin Chinese – lexical tones – together with vowels in sound–shape mappings and sound–size mappings
Our results suggest that the participants used both vowels and lexical tones when performing the sound–shape matching task

Summary

Introduction

People tend to associate some properties in one sensory modality to those in another modality, a phenomenon called crossmodal correspondences In sound–shape mappings, the bouba–kiki effect constitutes the most wellknown example: people often match visual shapes with rounded contours to spoken pseudowords such as ‘maluma’ or ‘bouba,’ whereas they match others with angular contours to spoken pseudowords such as ‘takete’ or ‘kiki’ (e.g., Holland and Wertheimer, 1964; Köhler, 1929, 1947) Such sound–shape mapping is suggested to be universal because it has reliably been demonstrated in adults from various cultures (Bremner et al, 2013; Davis, 1961; Rogers and Ross, 1975). These results suggest that sound–shape mappings were affected by the participant’s own perceptual styles and language experiences (e.g., Chen et al, 2016; Rogers and Ross, 1975; Shang and Styles, 2017)

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Conclusion