A conceptual mediation hypothesis of synaesthesia: What can yellow Tuesdays tell us about how we represent objects?
-
1
Macquarie University, Cognitive Science, Australia
-
2
University of Manchester, School of Psychological Sciences, United Kingdom
Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory modality triggers involuntary experiences typically not associated with that stimulation. A synaesthete may experience colours when seeing words, letters, and digits, or while listening to music or smelling an odour. There has been considerable progress over the last decade in understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms of synaesthesia. Current neurocognitive models of synaesthesia construe it as a perceptual phenomenon and hence focus primarily on the modality-specific brain regions for perception. Many behavioural studies, however, suggest an important role for conceptual level information in synaesthesia. We will give a brief overview of this evidence as the basis for hypothesising that synaesthesia resembles more general conceptual knowledge for object attributes, at both psychophysical and neural level. We present studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation to test whether neural mechanisms lying beyond the brain regions involved in early perceptual processing, such as regions subserving conceptual knowledge, play pivotal roles in the neural architecture of synaesthesia. We then discuss a conceptual-mediation model of synaesthesia to incorporate these important non-perceptual components of this intriguing phenomenon.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Menzies Foundation & Macquarie University.
Keywords:
synaesthesia,
theories,
conceptual knowledge,
semantic knowledge,
object colour
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Symposia
Topic:
Sensation and Perception
Citation:
Rich
AN and
Chiou
R
(2015). A conceptual mediation hypothesis of synaesthesia: What can yellow Tuesdays tell us about how we represent objects?.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00437
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
14 Apr 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Anina N Rich, Macquarie University, Cognitive Science, Sydney, New South Wales, 2109, Australia, anina.rich@mq.edu.au