Numeracy skills in child synaesthetes: Evidence from grapheme-colour synaesthesia

Abstract

Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a neurological trait that causes lifelong colour associations for letter and numbers. Synaesthesia studies have demonstrated differences between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes in ways that extend beyond synaesthesia itself (e.g., differences in their cognition, personality, and creativity). This research has focused almost exclusively on adult synaesthetes, and little is known about the profiles of synaesthetic children. By and large, findings suggest advantages for synaesthetes (e.g., Chun & Hupé, 2016;

Categorical consistency facilitates implicit learning of color-number associations

“…Color and parity may also be a good pair for establishing category-level associations. In number-color synesthesia, synesthetic color associations appear to affect numerical cognition (magnitude: [ 75 , 76 ]). Color is often learned and interacted with categorically (e.g., [ 77 ]; categorical effects in the word-reading Stroop task: [ 78 , 79 ]).…”

The Parent-completed Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire: Exploring Children’s Sensory Sensitivities and Their Relationship to Well-being

“…Importantly, although items from the existing adult GSQ were originally chosen to reflect knowledge within the autism literature on sensory sensitivities (Baranek et al, 2006;Robertson & Simmons, 2013) it has been successfully validated and utilised in normative adult populations. Furthermore, adult instruments have been successfully adapted to a parent-report perspective (Rinaldi et al, 2020). Our tool, therefore, took the form of an appropriate re-wording of the GSQ, to create a parent-report for describing children from both typically-developing and clinical populations.…”

“…We collected data from the parents of children involved in the MULTISENSE project, a longitudinal study funded by the European Research Council intended to investigate multisensory learning in children aged 6-11 years (Rinaldi et al, 2020(Rinaldi et al, , 2022Simner et al, 2021). The original study measured how individual differences in multisensory learning correlate with differences in cognition, attainment, well-being, creativity, and so onwith one component being sensory sensitivities, for which the current instrument was originally required (and hence devised).…”