| Popis: |
Puzzling in its diversity and resistant to simple theoretical accounts, synesthesia has been a subject of scrutiny and investigation for more than a century. Long treated as a cross-modal perceptual phenomenon in which stimuli presented in one modality produce additional sensations in another, modern research has highlighted the roles of learning and cognition in many kinds of synesthesia, not all of them cross-modal. Common approaches to understanding synesthesia include monism, which treats synesthesia as one pole of a continuous trait, and dualism, which distinguishes synesthesia from nonsynesthesia and searches for synesthesia’s common denominators. A third approach, pluralism, posits multiple distinct categories of synesthesia: One category (or more) may be prototypical, a good candidate being cross-modal synesthesia. Principles that characterize cross-modal synesthesia also characterize cross-modal perception in nonsynesthetes, and mechanisms that underlie prototypical cross-modal synesthesia may serve as the wellspring for the development of synesthesia’s diverse other forms. |
