I am a postdoc at the Synesthesia Research Center at the University of Amsterdam. We study an extraordinary neural phenomenon called synesthesia, and use it as a tool to study how the brain structures our conscious experiences. I have two primary research interests: (1) using synesthetic letter-color associations to study written language representation in the brain, and (2) using synesthetic touch-color associations as a model for sensory substitution in the blind.

Grapheme-Color Synesthesia as a Window into Written Language Representation

When forced to choose the color that “goes best with” a particular letter, synesthetes (and also non-synesthetes!) tend to associate certain letters with certain colors. There are numerous “rules” that influence which letter gets which color: for example, similarly pronounced letters are often associated with similar colors. Although most synesthesia research in the past was conducted in English, recent studies revealed that the experiences of synesthetes can differ depending on their native language. I started the Cross-Language Synesthesia Consortium, an international consortium of synesthesia researchers who collect data from synesthetes in more than 20 languages. We combine the toolkits of psychophysics and psycholinguistics to create a model of how color associations are influenced by linguistic properties, and how this differs across the world’s languages. Our lab is now using neuroimaging to test the viability of using this approach to explore broader questions about how the brain processes and represents written language.

Touch-Color Synesthesia as a Model for Sensory Substitution in the Blind

When forced to choose the color that “goes best with” the experience of touching a particular texture (sticky, soft, etc.), people tend to associate certain textures with certain colors. To understand these associations, we must understand both how physical properties of materials (e.g., “adhesion”, measured with a machine) relate to perceptual properties of touch (e.g., “stickiness”, measured in humans), and how perceptual properties of touch relate to colors. In collaboration with the Lipomi Nanoengineering Lab (UCSD; University of Rochester), our lab combines the toolkits of haptic psychophysics, synesthesia, and materials science to create a “translation” between properties of vision and touch. Our lab is now collaborating with Edward de Haan (Radboud University) and the Royal Dutch Visio to test the viability of using this approach to create vision-to-touch sensory substitution devices for the blind.