The interaction of synesthetic and print color and its relation to visual imagery

Synesthetic color induced by graphemes is well understood to be an automatic perceptual phenomenon paralleling print color in some ways, but also differing in others. We addressed this juxtaposition by asking how synesthetes are affected by synesthetic and print colors that are the same. We tested two groups of grapheme–color synesthetes using a basic color-priming method in which a grapheme prime was presented, followed by a color patch (probe), the color of which was to be named as quickly and accurately as possible. The primes induced either no color, print color only, synesthetic color only, or both forms of color (e.g., a letter “A” printed in red that also triggered synesthetic red). As expected, responses to name the probe color were faster if it was congruent with the prime color than if it was incongruent. The new finding (Exp. 1) was that a prime that induced the same print and synesthetic colors led to substantially larger priming effects than did either type of color individually, an effect that could not be attributed to semantic priming (Exp. 2). In addition, the synesthesia effects correlated with a standard measure of visual imagery. These findings are discussed as being consistent with the hypothesis that print and synesthetic color converge on similar color mechanisms.     

A Critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Scientific Theology

Abstract

In Theology and the Philosophy of Science, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that theology is on a par with the natural sciences, insofar as theological statements are hypotheses subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by experience. He defends his thesis by claiming that theology makes truth-claims about reality; and, second, that these are verifiable in the same sense that scientific statements are. I will argue that this thesis is wrong; and that the first claim could be right in a sense that has yet to be made clear; the second is not defensible even if fleshed out by some conceivable scientific scenario.     

Two plus blue equals green: Grapheme-color synesthesia allows cognitive access to numerical information via color

In grapheme-color synesthesia, graphemes (e.g., numbers or letters) evoke color experiences. It is generally reported that the opposite is not true: colors will not generate experiences of graphemes or their associated information. However, recent research has provided evidence that colors can implicitly elicit symbolic representations of associated graphemes. Here, we examine if these representations can be cognitively accessed. Using a mathematical verification task replacing graphemes with color patches, we find that synesthetes can verify such problems with colors as accurately as with graphemes. Doing so, however, takes time: ～250 ms per color. Moreover, we find minimal reaction time switch-costs for switching between computing with graphemes and colors. This demonstrates that given specific task demands, synesthetes can cognitively access numerical information elicited by physical colors, and they do so as accurately as with graphemes. We discuss these results in the context of possible cognitive strategies used to access the information.     

Sleep architecture in patients with fibromyalgia

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the characteristics of sleep in patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia syndrome. Sleep architecture in 32 patients with fibromyalgia and 20 healthy controls was evaluated. Following the recommendations of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology, polysomnographies were conducted with fibromyalgia patients and the control subjects. The fibromyalgia patients showed alterations in cyclic organization of sleep and an increased number of periodic leg movements associated with cortical arousals. No significant differences were found in respiratory and oximetry variables or in alpha-delta sleep. The results support that fibromyalgia patients present an increase of superficial sleep at the expense of deep sleep and also an increase of periodic leg movements, which could have a pathogenic effect, facilitating the onset of the illness. Lastly, we discuss the results and propose some future lines of research.     

Hierarchical encoding in visual working memory: ensemble statistics bias memory for individual items

Influential models of visual working memory treat each item to be stored as an independent unit and assume that there are no interactions between items. However, real-world displays have structure that provides higher-order constraints on the items to be remembered. Even in the case of a display of simple colored circles, observers can compute statistics, such as mean circle size, to obtain an overall summary of the display. We examined the influence of such an ensemble statistic on visual working memory. We report evidence that the remembered size of each individual item in a display is biased toward the mean size of the set of items in the same color and the mean size of all items in the display. This suggests that visual working memory is constructive, encoding displays at multiple levels of abstraction and integrating across these levels, rather than maintaining a veridical representation of each item independently.