ReviewFrontiers in human neuroscience2014
Synesthesia and learning: a critical review and novel theory.
Review in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Grapheme-color associations can transfer to novel graphemes when synesthetic colors function as grapheme "discriminating markers".Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Trial
- Article
- Awareness and self-reported synesthesia related experiences among undergraduate medical students: a cross-sectional study.BMC neuroscience · 2026Article
- Review
- Face-Processing Differences Present in Grapheme-Color Synesthetes.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Is It Just Face Blindness? Exploring Developmental Comorbidity in Individuals with Self-Reported Developmental Prosopagnosia.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Apparent physical brightness of graphemes is altered by their synaesthetic colour in grapheme-colour synaesthetes.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Reduced perceptual narrowing in synesthesia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Learning in colour: children with grapheme-colour synaesthesia show cognitive benefits in vocabulary and self-evaluated reading.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Synaesthesia: a distinct entity that is an emergent feature of adaptive neurocognitive differences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Echoes from the past: synaesthetic colour associations reflect childhood gender stereotypes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Stochastic resonance model of synaesthesia.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Do synaesthesia and mental imagery tap into similar cross-modal processes?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The Emergence of Synaesthesia in a Neuronal Network Model via Changes in Perceptual Sensitivity and Plasticity.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- A predictive nature for tactile awareness? Insights from damaged and intact central-nervous-system functioning.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2015Article
- Developing synaesthesia: a primer.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2015Article
- Prevalence of learned grapheme-color pairings in a large online sample of synesthetes.PloS one · 2015Article
- Semantic mechanisms may be responsible for developing synesthesia.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2014Article
- Automaticity in Stimulus-Parity Synaesthesia.i-PerceptionArticle
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 research has shown that the associations individual synesthetes make with these learned inducers are not arbitrary, but are strongly influenced by the structure of the learned domain. For instance, the synesthetic colors of letters are partially determined by letter frequency and the relative positions of letters in the alphabet. On the other hand, there is also a small, but growing, body of literature which shows that synesthesia can influence or be helpful in learning. For instance, synesthetes appear to be able to use their unusual experiences as mnemonic devices and can even exploit them while learning novel abstract categories. Here we review these two directions of influence and argue that they are interconnected. We propose that synesthesia arises, at least in part, because of the cognitive demands of learning in childhood, and that it is used to aid perception and understanding of a variety of learned categories. Our thesis is that the structural similarities between synesthetic triggering stimuli and synesthetic experiences are the remnants, the fossilized traces, of past learning challenges for which synsethesia was helpful.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.