Consistency of synesthetic associations over time is a widely used test of synesthesia. Since many studies suggest that consistency is not a completely reliable feature, we compared the consistency and strength of synesthetes' grapheme-color associations. Consistency was measured by scores on the Synesthesia Battery and by the Euclidean distance in color space for the specific graphemes tested for each participant. Strength was measured by congruency magnitudes on the Implicit Association Test. The strength of associations was substantially greater for synesthetes than non-synesthetes, suggesting that this is a novel, objective marker of synesthesia. Although, intuitively, strong associations should also be consistent, consistency and strength were uncorrelated, indicating that they are likely independent, at least for grapheme-color synesthesia. These findings have implications for our understanding of synesthesia and for estimates of its prevalence since synesthetes who experience strong, but inconsistent, associations may not be identified by tests that focus solely on consistency.

中文翻译：

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字素-颜色关联的一致性和强度是合成体验的可分离方面。

随着时间的过去，联觉关联的一致性是一种广泛使用的联觉测试。由于许多研究表明一致性不是一个完全可靠的功能，因此我们比较了同义词的字形-颜色关联的一致性和强度。一致性是通过联觉电池上的分数和色彩空间中的欧氏距离来衡量的，这些色彩是针对每个参与者测试的特定字素的。强度是通过内隐关联测试中的等值量度的。联觉器官的结合强度明显高于非联觉器官，这表明这是一种新的客观的联觉标志。尽管从直觉上讲，强关联也应该是一致的，但是一致性和强度是不相关的，这表明它们很可能是独立的，至少对于字素色联觉。这些发现对我们对联觉的理解和其普遍性的估计有重要意义，因为联觉者经历了强大但不一致的联想，而不能仅通过专注于一致性的测试来识别联觉。