ArticleScientific reports2014
Adults can be trained to acquire synesthetic experiences.
Article in Scientific reports, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- From multisensory integration to synaesthesia: a boundary-preserving continuum and research framework.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- One- or two-step? New insights into two-step hypothesis and rainbow-like theory for pitch class-color synesthesia.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Modern Aspects of the Complex Interactions between Biodiversity and the Main Neuropsychiatric Disorders.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Reduced perceptual narrowing in synesthesia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- 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
- Neurophenomenology of induced and natural synaesthesia.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Inducing synesthesia in non-synesthetes: Short-term visual deprivation facilitates auditory-evoked visual percepts.Consciousness and cognition · 2019Article
- Domain-general enhancements of metacognitive ability through adaptive training.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2019Article
- The Effects of Visual Cues, Blindfolding, Synesthetic Experience, and Musical Training on Pure-Tone Frequency Discrimination.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Synaesthesia-type associations and perceptual changes induced by hypnotic suggestion.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Synesthesia strengthens sound-symbolic cross-modal correspondences.The European journal of neuroscience · 2016Article
- Is synaesthesia a dominantly female trait?Cognitive neuroscience · 2015Article
- Assessment of the hemispheric lateralization of grapheme-color synesthesia with Stroop-type tests.PloS one · 2015Article
- Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Synesthesia is a condition where presentation of one perceptual class consistently evokes additional experiences in different perceptual categories. Synesthesia is widely considered a congenital condition, although an alternative view is that it is underpinned by repeated exposure to combined perceptual features at key developmental stages. Here we explore the potential for repeated associative learning to shape and engender synesthetic experiences. Non-synesthetic adult participants engaged in an extensive training regime that involved adaptive memory and reading tasks, designed to reinforce 13 specific letter-color associations. Following training, subjects exhibited a range of standard behavioral and physiological markers for grapheme-color synesthesia; crucially, most also described perceiving color experiences for achromatic letters, inside and outside the lab, where such experiences are usually considered the hallmark of genuine synesthetes. Collectively our results are consistent with developmental accounts of synesthesia and illuminate a previously unsuspected potential for new learning to shape perceptual experience, even in adulthood.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.