Research ReportSynaesthesia is linked to a distinctive and heritable cognitive profile
Section snippets
Method
We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all inclusion/exclusion criteria, whether inclusion/exclusion criteria were established prior to data analysis, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.
Results
As a preliminary analysis, the individual test scores of the synaesthetes are compared against the controls (see Supplementary for full test breakdown). Significant differences were found for accuracy scores on the Embedded Figures Test (t(199) = 2.832, p = .005) and Memory test (t(199) = 2.928, p = .004), with synaesthetes scoring higher. Moreover, synaesthetes self-report greater mental imagery across all senses (t(199) = 3.553, p < .001), greater sensory sensitivity (t(199) = 5.838, p
Discussion
This is the first study to show that synaesthetes can be discriminated from non-synaesthetes based on brief standard measures of cognition and personality using machine-learning classification. The accuracy of classification was shown to depend on two initially hypothesised variables: the extensiveness of a person's synaesthesia (someone with more extreme synaesthesia has a more distinctive cognitive profile) and whether one is genetically related to someone with synaesthesia (non-synaesthetes
Open practices
The study in this article earned Open Materials and Open Data badges for transparent practices. Materials and data for the study are available at https://osf.io/xk893.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jamie Ward: Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Gözde Filiz: Data curation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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More time for science: Using Testable to create and share behavioral experiments faster, recruit better participants, and engage students in hands-on research
2020, Progress in Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :There are already numerous peer-reviewed studies relying on Testable experiments. It is not possible to mention all here, but papers have been published in journals such as: PNAS (Phillips and Cushman, 2017), Psychological Science (Papeo et al., 2017), Scientific Reports (Smith et al., 2017), Cerebral Cortex (Vannuscorps et al., 2019), Cortex (Biotti et al., 2017; Ward and Filiz, 2020), Cognitive Psychology (Foster-Hanson and Rhodes, 2019), Evolution and Human Behavior (Jones, 2018), Neuropsychologia (Jiahui et al., 2017; Vannuscorps and Caramazza, 2016), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (Rezlescu et al., 2017), Attention, Perception & Psychophysics (Won et al., 2020), Experimental Brain Research (Forbes, and Hamilton, 2017), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (Sabatino DiCriscio and Troiani, 2017), Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Devue and Grimshaw, 2018), Vision Research (Balas and Saville, 2017; Hacker et al., 2019), Visual Cognition (Finzi et al., 2016), Perception (Kramer and Reynolds, 2018), PeerJ (Kramer et al., 2018), BMJ Open (Scherf et al., 2018), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Rocklage and Fazio, 2018). Testable is also a companion website for the fourth edition of Jamie Ward's popular textbook The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience (2020).
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