Learning and synesthesia are profoundly interconnected. On the one hand, the development of synesthesia is clearly influenced by learning. Synesthetic inducers - the stimuli that evoke these unusual experiences - often involve the perception of complex properties learned in early childhood, e.g., letters, musical notes, numbers, months of the year, and even swimming strokes. Further, recent res...

People with grapheme-color synesthesia perceive enriched experiences of colors in response to graphemes (letters, digits). In this study, we examined whether these synesthetes show a generic associative memory advantage for stimuli that do not elicit a synesthetic color. We used a novel between group design (14 young synesthetes, 14 young, and 14 older adults) with a self-paced visual associati...

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological condition in which viewing numbers or letters (graphemes) results in the concurrent sensation of color. While the anatomical substrates underlying this experience are well understood, little research to date has investigated factors influencing the particular colors associated with particular graphemes or how synesthesia occurs developmentally. A rec...

Automaticity is a defining characteristic of synaesthesia. Here, we assess for automaticity in stimulus-parity synaesthesia; a subtype that has been documented only 3 times in the literature. Synaesthete R experiences many (nonnumerical) stimuli as being odd or even. She described a toy shape-sorter, which paired odd shapes with even colour slots (and vice versa) and relayed difficulties with t...

Ward and Banissy provide an excellent overview of the state of mirror-touch research in order to advance this field. They present a comparison of two prominent theoretical approaches for understanding mirror-touch phenomena. According to the threshold theory, the phenomena arise as a result of a hyperactive mirror neuron system. According to the Self-Other Theory, they are due to disturbances i...

In this review we explore the relationship between synaesthesia and sensory substitution and argue that sensory substitution does indeed show properties of synaesthesia. Both are associated with atypical perceptual experiences elicited by the processing of a qualitatively different stimulus to that which normally gives rise to that experience. In the most common forms of sensory substitution, p...