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ISSN : 1226-9654

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Vol.21 No.4

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Phenomenal and Experimental approaches to synesthetic experience of Korean color-graphemic synesthetes

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2009, v.21 no.4, pp.309-335
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2009.21.4.005


& (2009). Phenomenal and Experimental approaches to synesthetic experience of Korean color-graphemic synesthetes. The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, 21(4), 309-335, https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2009.21.4.005

Abstract

Synesthesia is a condition under which a stimulus in one sensory modality induces unusual perceptual experience in another sensory modality. Here we report Korean synesthetes who experience colors when viewing alphanumeric characters. This study not only describes phenomenal aspects of synesthetic color experiences associated with graphemes including Korean alphabet (“Han-gul”) but also verifies authenticity and perceptual reality of synesthetic experience by exploiting a couple of experimental paradigms. Experiment 1 utilized a synesthetic version of the Stroop task to verify the automaticity of synesthetic experience. By presenting a Korean grapheme either in physical color matching the observer's synesthetic color experienced by the grapheme(the congruent condition) or in a “wrong” color(the incongruent condition), we observed increased reaction time when the physical color doesn't match synesthetic color, which reveals interference of synesthetic color in real color judgment. Experiment 2 exploited a visual search task to verify perceptual reality of syensthetic color. When a target inducing synesthetic color was located among many distracters inducing different synesthetic color, the set-size effect(i.e., increase in reaction time as the number of stimulus increases) from synesthetic observers was reduced compared to that from non-synesthetic observers. The result shows that synesthetic color improved search efficiency as real color does in ordinary visual search task. This study is by far the first report on Korean color-graphemic syesthetes integrating both phenomenal and experimental aspects of their synesthetic color experiences.

keywords
공감각, 한글, 스트룹 과제, 자동성, 시각 탐지 과제, 지각적 실재성, Syensthesia, Han-gul, the Stroop effect, Automaticity, Visual search task, Perceptual reality, Syensthesia, Han-gul, the Stroop effect, Automaticity, Visual search task, Perceptual reality

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