Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 117, Issue 18, Pages 10089-10096Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1914668117
Keywords
synesthesia; perceptual narrowing; speech perception; face processing; pruning
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Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [9797, RGPIN-2015-03967]
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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 /da/ and dental /da/), 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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