ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Reduced perceptual narrowing in synesthesia.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- The reading brain - Transforming vision into language.Progress in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Genetic and environmental contributions to the link between synaesthesia and neurodevelopmental and psychiatric features: a twin study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Voice-Evoked Color Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks in Sound-Color Synesthesia.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- 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
- Review
- Calibrating Vision: Concepts and Questions.Vision research · 2022Review
- 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
- Catalysts for change: the cellular neurobiology of psychedelics.Molecular biology of the cell · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Synesthesia is a neurologic trait in which specific inducers, such as sounds, automatically elicit additional idiosyncratic percepts, such as color (thus "colored hearing"). One explanation for this trait-and the one tested here-is that synesthesia results from unusually weak pruning of cortical synaptic hyperconnectivity during early perceptual development. We tested the prediction from this hypothesis that synesthetes would be superior at making discriminations from nonnative categories that are normally weakened by experience-dependent pruning during a critical period early in development-namely, discrimination among nonnative phonemes (Hindi retroflex /d̪a/ and dental /ɖa/), among chimpanzee faces, and among inverted human faces. Like the superiority of 6-mo-old infants over older infants, the synesthetic groups were significantly better than control groups at making all the nonnative discriminations across five samples and three testing sites. The consistent superiority of the synesthetic groups in making discriminations that are normally eliminated during infancy suggests that residual cortical connectivity in synesthesia supports changes in perception that extend beyond the specific synesthetic percepts, consistent with the incomplete pruning hypothesis.
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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.