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Abstract:
Abstract: Individuals with color-graphemic synaesthesia
experience vivid sensations of color when reading words, letters or
digits. Here we present findings from a study of 15 color-graphemic
synaesthetes, in which color naming and word reading were measured
in a series of modified Stroop-type tasks. Synaesthetes showed the
expected cost for naming the colors of incongruent versus congruent
color words in a standard Stroop task. The task was then modified
to investigate whether the synaesthetes could suppress their
unusual percepts when these were detrimental to task performance.
Alphanumeric characters, selected to elicit a unique color for each
individual, were presented in print colors that were either
congruent or incongruent with the relevant synaesthetic color.
Synaesthetes' color naming times were significantly slower for
incongruent versus congruent items; there was no such effect for
non-synaesthetic controls. In a further modification, participants
had to name the color of a target which followed a briefly
presented alphanumeric prime. The achromatic prime was either
synaesthetically congruent or incongruent with the colored target.
Synaesthetes again showed significant interference for incongruent
versus congruent prime-target trials. Similar results were obtained
for a word reading task, in which the target was a color word
preceded by an alphanumeric prime. These results suggest that
color-graphemic synaesthesia is an automatic perceptual phenomenon
that cannot be suppressed, even when it interferes with cognitive
performance.
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