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SUMMARY:Colour perception in synaesthesia - Professor Katsuaki Sakata\, Jo
 shibi University of Art and Design\, Japan
DTSTART:20160217T130000Z
DTEND:20160217T140000Z
UID:TALK64188@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:John Mollon
DESCRIPTION:We studied grapheme-colour synaesthesia in persons who inheren
 tly see characters with colour. The aim of the study was to understand the
  mechanism of their colour perception and identify the sensory-perceptual 
 processing stage at which synaesthesia occurs. We varied characters – di
 gits\, Latin letters and Japanese logotypes (hiragana\, katakana\, kanji) 
 – with regards to their pictorial features\, associated phonetic and sem
 antic information\, while assessing change in elicited colour.\nOur result
 s reveal that a similar colour was elicited under the following conditions
 :          (i) similar shape (e.g. 0 and O)\; (ii) different shape but sim
 ilar phonetics (e.g. ka in Japanese)\; (iii) different shape and different
  phonetics but similar meaning. Our results reveal that grapheme-colour sy
 naesthesia is influenced by the character shape\, a low-level feature. The
  effect is\, though\, overruled by the effect of the character phonetics\,
  while the character meaning is superior to both\, i.e. the phenomenon tha
 t follows the hierarchical feature extraction in the order that reflects t
 he principle stages of human cognitive processing. Notably\, symbols indic
 ating specific pronunciation quality (e.g. diacritic umlaut in O vs. Ö) c
 aused changes in the elicited colour that varied along the blue-yellow axi
 s of colour space\, implying opponency in colour synaesthesia. We conclude
  that the grapheme-colour synaesthesia occurs early in the visual pathway.
  It is considered to result from neural confounding\, or cross-activation 
 (Ramachandran & Hubbard\, 2001) in the colour area V4 and right parietal-o
 ccipital region.
LOCATION:Kenneth Craik Room\, Craik-Marshall Building\, Downing Site
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