The advantage of being a synesthete: The behavioral benefits of ticker-tape synesthesia

Abstract

As first described by Francis Galton, some persons perceive vividly and automatically in their mind's eye the written form of words that they are hearing. This phenomenon, labeled ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), is thought to reflect an abnormally strong influence of speech processing in language areas on to orthographic representations in the visual cortex. Considering the relevance of TTS for the study of reading acquisition, we looked for objective behavioral advantages or impairments in 22 synesthetes, as compared to 22 matched control participants. In three auditory tasks relying on orthographic working memory (letters counting, backward spelling, and letter shape decision), we predicted and observed better performance in synesthetes than in controls. In two visual tasks (lexical decision and letter decision) with a concurrent auditory stimulation, we predicted that synesthetes should suffer from a larger interference by irrelevant speech than controls, but eventually found no difference between the groups. Those results, which we discuss in relation to orthographic processing, mental imagery, and working memory, promote TTS from pure subjectivity to an experimentally measurable phenomenon.