ArticleBritish journal of psychology (London, England : 1953)2016
Are synesthetes exceptional beyond their synesthetic associations? A systematic comparison of creativity, personality, cognition, and mental imagery in synesthetes and controls.
Article in British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953), 2016. 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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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Increased prevalence of synaesthesia in musicians.Perception · 2026Article
- Transient acquisition process of grapheme-color synesthesia on novel graphemes.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Synesthesia is linked to large and extensive differences in brain structure and function as determined by whole-brain biomarkers derived from the HCP (Human Connectome Project) cortical parcellation approach.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- When small effect sizes become huge: Synaesthesia is linked to very large differences in cognition.Perception · 2024Article
- Investigation of the relationship between neuroplasticity and grapheme-color synesthesia.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Genetic and environmental architecture of synaesthesia and its association with the autism spectrum-a twin study.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Synesthesia does not help to recover perceptual dominance following flash suppression.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings: Phenomenology, Altered States, Individual Differences, and Well-Being.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- A persistent memory advantage is specific to grapheme-colour synaesthesia.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Strategies Used by Musicians to Identify Notes' Pitch: Cognitive Bricks and Mental Representations.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Person identification from EEG using various machine learning techniques with inter-hemispheric amplitude ratio.PloS one · 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
- Exploring the relationship between grapheme colour-picking consistency and mental imagery.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
- 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
- Creativity and involvement in art in different types of synaesthesia.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2019Article
- Double-blind study of visual imagery in grapheme-color synesthesia.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019Article
- Synesthesia strengthens sound-symbolic cross-modal correspondences.The European journal of neuroscience · 2016Article
- Hyper memory, synaesthesia, savants Luria and Borges revisited.Dementia & neuropsychologiaArticle
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Synesthesia has historically been linked with enhanced creativity, but this had never been demonstrated in a systematically recruited sample. The current study offers a broad examination of creativity, personality, cognition, and mental imagery in a small sample of systematically recruited synesthetes and controls (n = 65). Synesthetes scored higher on some measures of creativity, personality traits of absorption and openness, and cognitive abilities of verbal comprehension and mental imagery. The differences were smaller than those reported in the literature, indicating that previous studies may have overestimated group differences, perhaps due to biased recruitment procedures. Nonetheless, most of our results replicated literature findings, yielding two possibilities: (1) our study was influenced by similar biases, or (2) differences between synesthetes and controls, though modest, are robust across recruitment methods. The covariance among our measures warrants interpretation of these differences as a pattern of associations with synesthesia, leaving open the possibility that this pattern could be explained by differences on a single measured trait, or even a hidden, untested trait. More generally, this study highlights the difficulty of comparing groups of people in psychology, not to mention neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies. The requirements discussed here - systematic recruitment procedures, large battery of tests, and large cohorts - are best fulfilled through collaborative efforts and cumulative science.
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