Image: Courtesy of Karen Dobkins and Katie Wagner University of California, San Diego
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What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that we are all born synesthetes like Kandinsky, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another.
The work, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, has become the first experimental confirmation of the infant-synesthesia hypothesis—which has existed, unproved, for almost 20 years.
Researchers presented infantsand adults with images of repeating shapes (either circles or triangles) on a split-color background: one side was red or blue, and the other side was yellow or green. If the infants had shape-color associations, the scientists hypothesized, the shapes would affect their color preferences. For instance, some infants might look significantly longer at a green background with circles than at the same green background with triangles. Absent synesthesia, no such difference would be visible.
The study confirmed this hunch. Infants who were two and three months old showed significant shape-color associations. By eight months the preference was no longer pronounced, and in adults it was gone altogether.
The more important implications of this work may lie beyond synesthesia, says lead author Katie Wagner, a psychologist at U.C.S.D. The finding provides insight into how babies learn about the world more generally. “Infants may perceive the world in a way that’s fundamentally different from adults,” Wagner says. As we age, she adds, we narrow our focus, perhaps gaining an edge in cognitive speed as the sensory symphony quiets down.
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5 Comments
Add CommentFits the theory that brain starts with neurons broadly "everything randomly links to everything" and development is removing irrelevant connections and strengthening relevant ones. So this process would be still at the early stage among newborns.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article states"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If the infants had shape-color associations, the scientists hypothesized, the shapes would affect their color preferences. For instance, some infants might look significantly longer at a green background with circles than at the same green background with triangles. Absent synesthesia, no such difference would be visible."
"The study confirmed this hunch. Infants who were two and three months old showed significant shape-color associations. By eight months the preference was no longer pronounced, and in adults it was gone altogether."
Unfortunately, from this simple description of the test it's impossible to determine whether there the babies actually experienced synesthesia or not.
The simplest explanation of the described results is simply that babies prefer to look at circles rather than triangles. Perhaps the sharp corners of triangles are difficult for babies to focus in on.
If the results included a preference for looking at circles on yellow cards and triangles on blue cards then there'd be a stronger case for a preferential shape-color association, but still no strong evidence for synesthesia - that certain shapes actually evoke the visual sensation of certain colors, for example.
I agree that it's quite possible that babies actually experience synesthesia, but the experiment described here offers little evidence one way or another.
"The simplest explanation of the described results is simply that babies prefer to look at circles rather than triangles."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr perhaps, from an evolutionary point of view, nipples are round. Why would an infant need to find a triangle shape on it's mother?
Sounds reasonable to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLooks like another example of naive brains lacking the means to process data until they learn to differentiate data and develop scenarios and concepts to process it. See A Snyder, ‘Concept Formation: ‘Object Attributes Dynamically Inhibited From Conscious Awareness’, Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004, pp. 31–46
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExamples in that article. At six months of age infants can recognise faces of different monkeys, as well as those of different humans, and recognise phonetic differences in foreign languages. By twelve months of age children have specialised face recognition to human faces and recognition of phonetic differences to their native language. They lose the abilities to recognise differences in monkey faces and in foreign languages.
A large proportion of children start with absolute pitch and lose it. If they practice music or are exposed to music as children, they retain pitch as part of their concept formation.
Like the brains of naive children, the brains of autistics have data, but lack concepts and scenarios with which to process it. But that also means that they do not have concepts to inhibit how they use data. Some autistics are able to access data in ways that give them outstanding capabilities, often savant-like skills at mathematics or memory recall.
These are outlined in more detail on www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com.
This points to a standard process by which the brain learns to differentiate and process data by developing scenarios and concepts which then predetermine how data will be processed, creating specific capabilities and inhibiting access to data for other uses.
Einstein believed that he had missed out on some early development steps, making his mental processes more naive, enabling him to interrelate data in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
We should not assume that children are born as blank slates. The study JK Hamlin, K Wynn & P Bloom, ‘Social evaluation by preverbal infants’, Nature, 450, 2007, pp. 557–559 showed that 3 month old children consistently preferred co-operative behaviour.
What is not clear from the text is whether the preferences were consistent for each individual (suggesting personal aesthetic preferences) or across the group (suggesting innate predisposition).