Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Differences In Visuospatial Attentional Distribution Between Synesthetes And Non-Synesthetes, Identified Through Covert Visual Search, Kirsten Helena Ostbirk

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Synesthesia is a condition whereby sensory stimuli evoke unusual additional sensory perceptions and experiences, and can be identified through a visual search task. Grapheme-colour synesthetes have shown increased efficiency in visual search tasks, which some have hypothesized is a result of synesthetic colours drawing attention to the target stimulus, and have likened it to a weakened “pop-out” effect. Visual search has also been used to measure visuospatial attentional distribution, and findings from this method have supported the gradient model of attention, which proposes that cognitive resources are the most concentrated centrally in our visual field, and taper off, such that …