Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Synaesthesia is a variation within the neurotypical population in which atypical cross-modal associations occur. For example, grapheme–colour synaesthetes experience a colour sensation when viewing letter shapes. The mechanisms underlying synaesthesia remain debated. I propose that synaesthesia may draw on a more general mechanism—expertise—and reflect a cognitive strategy developed and refined to efficiently process a particular information category (e.g., letters). We have previously demonstrated that attentional parameters modulated by synaesthetic congruence (Ásgeirsson et al., 2015) resemble those modulated by perceptual expertise (Dall et al., 2021), and we have argued that long-term memory templates play a central role in perceptual processing (Brogaard & Sørensen, 2024). Although several findings support this account, attempts to train synaesthesia in non-synaesthetic individuals have met with limited success. However, studies using EEG indicate that semantic information—presumably instantiated in long-term memory templates—can influence both perceptual (Thierry et al., 2009) and conceptual processing (Casaponsa et al., 2024). Using a variation of the visual mismatch negativity paradigm in a case–control design, Zelazny, Dietz, and Sørensen (submitted) demonstrate a synaesthesia-related neural response to an oddball stimulus. These findings support the expertise account and identify a potential neural marker of synaesthesia that does not rely on behavioural consistency measures.
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154542802
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