Synaesthesia – a strategy for learning perceptual categories

Description

Synaesthesia is a condition where otherwise ordinary observers seem to have a variation in perceptual content related to specific categories, e.g. letters and colours. In recent years it has been proposed that there may be a link between autism and synaesthesia, as both seem to share cognitive similarities and be linked to early development. However, we believe that there are a number of problems with this link and often the syntesthetes we see are both well educated and functioning. Here I will argue that synaesthesia may in fact be a learning strategy, which some people deploy during development. In this talk I will provide a tentative definition of synaesthesia, and why we believe that synaesthesia may be more to be related to expertise and how we establish perceptual categories, than a developmental dysfunction.

Period	11 Dec 2019
Held at	University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	Local