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Do children with grapheme-colour synaesthesia show cognitive benefits?

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posted on 2023-06-09, 05:20 authored by Julia SimnerJulia Simner, Angela E Bain
Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is characterized by conscious and consistent associations between letters and colours, or between numbers and colours (e.g., synaesthetes might see A as red, 7 as green). Our study explored the development of this condition in a group of randomly sampled child synaesthetes. Two previous studies (Simner & Bain, 2013, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 603; Simner, Harrold, Creed, Monro, & Foulkes, 2009, Brain, 132, 57) had screened over 600 primary school children to find the first randomly sampled cohort of child synaesthetes. In this study, we evaluate this cohort to ask whether their synaesthesia is associated with a particular cognitive profile of strengths and/or weaknesses. We tested our child synaesthetes at age 10–11 years in a series of cognitive tests, in comparison with matched controls and baseline norms. One previous study (Green & Goswami, 2008, Cognition, 106, 463) had suggested that child synaesthetes might perform differently to non-synaesthetes in such tasks, although those participants may have been a special type of population independent of their synaesthesia. In our own study of randomly sampled child synaesthetes, we found no significant advantages or disadvantages in a receptive vocabulary test and a memory matrix task. However, we found that synaesthetes demonstrated above-average performance in a processing-speed task and a near-significant advantage in a letter-span task (i.e., memory/recall task of letters). Our findings point to advantages for synaesthetes that go beyond those expected from enhanced coding accounts and we present the first picture of the broader cognitive profile of a randomly sampled population of child synaesthetes.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

British Journal of Psychology

ISSN

0007-1269

Publisher

Wiley

Issue

1

Volume

109

Page range

118-136

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-02-28

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-03-30

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-02-28

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