Grapheme–color synesthesia is expected to provide a clue to solving the “binding problem” of visual features. Synesthetic research uses non-synesthetes as a control group and shows that synesthetes perform better with synesthetic color congruency, while non-synesthetes’ performances do not. However, non-synesthetes also have certain grapheme–color associations. Therefore, this study examined whether non-synesthetes’ grapheme–color associations improve their performance in a visual search task. The results indicated that non-synesthetes were significantly faster at detecting congruent targets with their grapheme–color associations, such as red for “A,” blue for “B,” and yellow for “C.” However, the effect was not found in relation to numerical characters. This study has implications for future neuroscience and consciousness research regarding grapheme–color synesthesia.

字素-颜色联觉有望为解决视觉特征的“绑定问题”提供线索。联觉研究使用非联觉者作为对照组，结果表明联觉者在联觉颜色一致性方面表现更好，而非联觉者的表​​现则不然。然而，非联觉者也有一定的字素-颜色关联。因此，这项研究检验了非联觉者的字素-颜色关联是否可以提高他们在视觉搜索任务中的表现。结果表明，非联觉者在检测具有字素-颜色关联的一致目标方面要快得多，例如红色代表“A”，蓝色代表“B”，黄色代表“C”。然而，没有发现与数字字符相关的效果。这项研究对未来关于字素-颜色联觉的神经科学和意识研究具有重要意义。