Journal article Sensation and Perception

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Journal Article Summary

Megan Student

Tennessee State University

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Journal Article Summary

The journal article “Color Opponency in Synaesthetic Experiences,” by Danko Nikolic,

Philipp Lichti, and Wolf Singer did two experiments on people with Grapheme-color

synaesthesia to examine whether there are color-opponent channels such as, red-green channels

and blue-yellow channels. Nikolic, Lichti, and Singer (2007) created two types of incongruent

conditions. In the first case, they predicted that the two colors could most likely be involved in

the same color channels. In the second case, they predicted that the colors would be related with

different color channels. They also predicted that if synaesthesia-generated colors are produced

on opposite color channels they would have a longer reaction time.

In Experiment 1, they had six subjects that were all color-grapheme synaesthetes; four,

which were women, and two, which were men. All of the subjects were between the ages of 25

and 41 years. Five of the people had extra forms of synaesthesia; one with tactile sensations by

music, one with color by smell, taste, and pain, and three with visual sensation by hearing music.

In all the people, vowels induced stronger color experiences than consonants. They tested the

subjects by showing them graphemes and asking them to record the colors from a book of 5,500

colors. They showed them each of the five graphemes ten times for each of the conditions,

resulting in 200 trials. For each subject, the five graphemes with the strongest association to

grapheme-color were used for stimuli in three conditions. Among those conditions were:

congruent, incongruent opponent, incongruent independent and baseline.

The accuracy of responses were very high; more than 98% correct. The time it took for

the subjects to respond to the graphemes varied among the four conditions. The people named

the colors faster in the incongruent independent condition than in the incongruent opponent

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condition. In the independent condition the synaesthetes’ response time was longer than in the

baseline condition, and were longer in the baseline condition than in the congruent.

In the second experiment, they looked at semantic instead of synaesthetic relations

between shape and color. They designed the stimuli on relations with everyday shapes and

colors like lemons are yellow. They hypothesized that the semantic affiliations related to

synaesthetic ones were not dependent on opponent-color system.

They had four synaesthetes and eight nonsynaethetes. They presented the object in the

normal color for experiment 2. They used three items: a lemon, a heart, and a smiley face. They

appeared in only three conditions there was no baseline condition. Each stimulus was presented

25 times, for a total of 225 trials.

Again the response was very high; more than 98% were correct. There were no

differences between the synaesthetes and the nonsynaethetes. The incongruent independent and

incongruent opponent condition differed but not by much, which was not the case in experiment

1. They determined that color opponency affect semantic relations between color and shape

differently than synaesthetics.

They concluded that experiences with synaesthetic color conflict with the perception and

the relaying of names of real colors. Since the results were consistent across the board for

synaesthetes, they concluded that this could be true for all the synaesthetic types.

This article does not really relate to me but it was interesting to read about these people

that every time see a letter think of something else. Sometimes when I see something I think of a

past experience but not every time, so this was different to think about people actually having to

deal with this day-to-day. For example, when I am listening to a song on the radio, I might think

about a time I danced to that song or what was happening when I first heard that song. I cannot

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refer back to a time when I heard music and I thought of a color or anything related to this

condition.

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References

Nikolic, D., Lichti, P., & Singer, W. (2007). Color opponency in synaesthetic experiences.

Psychological Science, 18, 481-486. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01925.x