However, the structural and functional mechanisms underlying synesthesia still remain contentious and hypothetical. Studies investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying synesthesia have yielded insight into neural processes behind such cognitive operations as attention, memory, spatial phenomenology and inter-modal processes. The phenomenon of synesthesia has undergone an invigoration of research interest and empirical progress over the past decade. Our thesis is that the structural similarities between synesthetic triggering stimuli and synesthetic experiences are the remnants, the fossilized traces, of past learning challenges for which synsethesia was helpful. We propose that synesthesia arises, at least in part, because of the cognitive demands of learning in childhood, and that it is used to aid perception and understanding of a variety of learned categories. Here we review these two directions of influence and argue that they are interconnected. For instance, synesthetes appear to be able to use their unusual experiences as mnemonic devices and can even exploit them while learning novel abstract categories. On the other hand, there is also a small, but growing, body of literature which shows that synesthesia can influence or be helpful in learning. For instance, the synesthetic colors of letters are partially determined by letter frequency and the relative positions of letters in the alphabet. Further, recent research has shown that the associations individual synesthetes make with these learned inducers are not arbitrary, but are strongly influenced by the structure of the learned domain. Synesthetic inducers – the stimuli that evoke these unusual experiences – often involve the perception of complex properties learned in early childhood, e.g., letters, musical notes, numbers, months of the year, and even swimming strokes. On the one hand, the development of synesthesia is clearly influenced by learning. Learning and synesthesia are profoundly interconnected.
By including a classification of kinds, types, and forms of synaesthesia into future experimental research will ensure a better understanding of the nature of this phenomenon, its mechanisms and the role that it plays in developing cognitive processes. There are huge individual differences in the manner that synaesthesia presents itself. The weaker types of synaesthesia are: sensory, perceptual, intramodal, analytic, partial, internal and unidirectional. The stronger types of synaesthesia are: semantic, conceptual, intermodal, synthetic, comprehensive, external and bidirectional. It was suggested that synaesthesia can be described in one dimension, showing the intensity of this phenomenon. There is a hypothesis that every kind of synaesthesia holds a different function-compensatory or integrative. Besides developmental synaesthesia being likely to play a crucial role in developing cognitive functions (constitutional or neonatal synaesthesia) there are types of synaesthesia acquired during adulthood (e.g., phantom or artificial synaesthesia), momentary synaesthesia triggered temporarily in people who do not show signs of synaesthesia every day (e.g., virtual, narcotic, or posthypnotic synaesthesia), and associational synaesthesia which, semantically speaking, refers to some universal sense relations (e.g., literary, artistic, and multimedia synaesthesia).
The main goal of this paper is to classify various types and forms of synaesthesia. This article is an attempt to synthesize the current knowledge about synaesthesia from many fields such as literature, arts, multimedia, medicine, or psychology.
0 kommentar(er)
