Synaesthetes’ drawings in response to sounds showed systematic trends between auditory pitch and synaesthetic experience, which follow the same rules as the implicit cross-modal mappings in non-synaesthetes. These patterns show up as significant correlations between increasing pitch and increase in brightness, reduction in size, and elevation in spatial location. The experimental results show that the visual experience of coloured shapes in specific spatial locations affects the behavioural performance of synaesthetes on both colour and shape judgements,

despite AZD5363 ic50 it being irrelevant to the task.3 This is consistent with previous reports on other forms of synaesthesia that synaesthetes are unable to effectively suppress their unusual experiences once they perceive the inducing stimuli (e.g., grapheme–colour synaesthesia: Mattingley et al., 2001; sound–colour synaesthesia: Ward et al., 2006). Although it was not as strong as these overall

effects, we also observed modulations by feature-based attention. Specifically, in Experiment 1, when synaesthetes attended selleck chemical to colour, a mismatch between the displayed colour and the synaesthetic colour caused a stronger congruency effect than a mismatch of shape, and vice versa when they attended to shape. Although this effect was not strong enough to survive the three-way interaction, it was evident in both planned comparisons 4-Aminobutyrate aminotransferase (based on our a priori prediction) and in the alternative exploratory analyses (see Supplementary Materials). These results suggest

that after synaesthetic percepts of coloured objects are elicited, feature-based attention acts on these objects to select and prioritise relevant features, which, in turn, modulates their behavioural impact. These congruency effects suggest both colour and non-colour features can be integral components of the unusual experience and should be considered in theories for synaesthesia. In addition, we need further studies to examine the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena. The perceptual characteristics and neural underpinnings of synaesthetic colour have been extensively studied, which point the way for future research on non-colour synaesthetic features. At the psychophysical level, the majority of evidence suggests that synaesthetic colour does not ‘behave’ like real colour (e.g., it shows no chromatic adaptation: Hong and Blake, 2008; it shows no pre-attentive pop-out: Ward et al., 2010; Edquist et al., 2006; Sagiv et al., 2006; Nijboer et al., 2011; Karstoft and Rich (submitted for publication), although see Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001), as well as Kim and Blake (2005), for synaesthetic colour showing properties like real colour). This is consistent with the idea that synaesthetic colour experiences arise at a late stage in the hierarchy of visual processing.