Multi-sensory Integration and Synaesthesia Flashcards
Define Synaesthesia.
Where one sensory/cognitive pathway leads to an automatic experience in a second sensory/cognitive pathway - joining of the senses.
What types of synaesthesia are there?
- Grapheme colour.
- Sound colour.
- Broadband and narrowband.
- Lexical gustatory.
- Mirror touch.
What is the McGurk effect?
What does multi-sensory integration rely on?
- Spatial and temporal coincidence
- Semantic congruency
- Probabilistic information - use reasoning to predict the things most likely to be happening at the same time, pattern-based
What is a biological characteristic of synaesthetes from childhood?
- Increased white matter connectivity
- Increased activation in inferior parietal cortex and fusiform gyrus
- Increased activation also found in frontal lobes
- Illustrates that they are not “impaired”, just atypical
What is grapheme-colour synaesthesia?
Seeing words or letters automatically and consistently evokes experiences of colour
Where do the colours appear?
Associator - in the minds eye
Projector - experience colour in visual field
What do synaesthetes perform better on?
At guessing the meaning of words they didn’t know, e.g. if given the words big and small in another language, syn are better at identifying which one means big and which one means small - means that sound symbolism and synaesthesia may have similar connections.
What is lexical-gestatory synaesthesia?
In tip of the tongue states, you can experience the words taste before they can retrieve the word
What are the three defining properties? (synaesthesia)
- Concrete perceptual experiences
- Elicited by stimuli in the environment or by internal thoughts
- Automatic and cannot be suppressed
What characteristics does synaesthesia hold?
- Biologically driven
- Presented over a lifespan
- Triggered by linguistic stimuli
How does acquired synaesthesia differ from synaesthesia?
It is produced from experiences (like a long term blind fold) or psychedelic drugs, so effects are only short term.
What three tests support synaesthesia?
