The neuronal correlate of bidirectional synesthesia: A combined event-related potential and functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Abstract

The neuronal correlate of a rare explicit bidirectional synesthesia was investigated with numerical and physical size comparison tasks using both functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potentials. Interestingly, although participant I.S. exhibited similar congruity effects for both tasks at the behavioral level, subsequent analyses of the imaging data revealed that different brain areas were recruited for each task, and in different time windows. The results support: (1) the genuineness of bidirectional synesthesia at the neuronal level, (2) the possibility that discrepancy in the neuronal correlates of synesthesia between previous studies might be task-related, and (3) the possibility that synesthesia might not be a unitary phenomenon. © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.