Do babies have synaesthesia?
Maurer, D., & Mondloch, C. Neonatal synesthesia: A re-evaluation. In L. Robertson & N. Sagiv (Eds.), Attention on Synesthesia: Cognition, Development and Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 193-213.
This article postulates that babies experience synaesthesia.
I’m not convinced of that hypothesis because (although I only skimmed the article), I couldn’t find any evidence of something that infants and synaesthetes do that non-synaesthetes do not do. But it still reviews some interesting facts.
There are apparently a number of tasks that demonstrate, to quote the article, “paradoxical evidence of U-shaped development of cross-modal perception: Babies demonstrated successful linking of information across sensory modalities near birth, failed at similar tasks later in infancy, and then appeared to gradually learn cross-modal links in the second half of the first year of life.”
The article also reviews evidence for mysterious, presumably innate cross-modal correspondences in normal adults. For example, high frequency sounds go together with lighter colors. Angular shapes go with aggression, strongness, and loudness. Brighter light goes with loudness.
January 5th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Thanks to Chris Chatham’s great weblog Developing Intelligence for pointing me to this article.
March 13th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
I think that synesthesia is really interesting. We just found out that my little sister has it, and so I’ve been trying to find out more about it over the last couple of days. Its cool to know that I used to have synesthesia too. Thats one thing (and probably the only thing) in commen.
Taylor L