The DOI matches its Crossref record; 31 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Synaesthesia: The Prevalence of Atypical Cross-Modal Experiences
Open accessAbstract
Sensory and cognitive mechanisms allow stimuli to be perceived with properties relating to sight, sound, touch, etc, and ensure, for example, that visual properties are perceived as visual experiences, rather than sounds, tastes, smells, etc. Theories of normal development can be informed by cases where this modularity breaks down, in a condition known as synaesthesia. Conventional wisdom has held that this occurs extremely rarely (0.05% of births) and affects women more than men. Here we present the first test of synaesthesia prevalence with sampling that does not rely on self-referral, and which uses objective tests to establish genuineness. We show that (a) the prevalence of synaesthesia is 88 times higher than previously assumed, (b) the most common variant is coloured days, (c) the most studied variant (grapheme - colour synaesthesia)—previously believed most common—is prevalent at 1%, and (d) there is no strong asymmetry in the distribution of synaesthesia across the sexes. Hence, we suggest that female biases reported earlier likely arose from (or were exaggerated by) sex differences in self-disclosure.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Journal of Consciousness Studies
(2022) · Journal of Consciousness Studies · doi:10.53765/20512201 · Cited by 6,832
Inquiries into human faculty and its development.
Galton, F. (1883) · MacMillan Co eBooks · doi:10.1037/14178-000 · Cited by 2,252
Synaesthesia? A window into perception, thought and language
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001) · Cited by 1,570
Sex differences in self-disclosure: A meta-analysis.
Dindia, K., & Allen, M. (1992) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037//0033-2909.112.1.106 · Cited by 919
On colored-hearing synesthesia: Cross-modal translations of sensory dimensions.
Marks, L. E. (1975) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037//0033-2909.82.3.303 · Cited by 449
Sound-Colour Synaesthesia: to What Extent Does it Use Cross-Modal Mechanisms Common to us All?
WARD, J., HUCKSTEP, B., & TSAKANIKOS, E. (2006) · Cortex · doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(08)70352-6 · Cited by 435
Self-citationPsychophysical investigations into the neural basis of synaesthesia
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.2000.1576 · Cited by 405
Synaesthesia : classic and contemporary readings
Baron‐Cohen, S., & Harrison, J. (1997) · Cited by 369
Functional magnetic resonance imaging of synesthesia: activation of V4/V8 by spoken words
Nunn, J. A., Gregory, L. J., Brammer, M., Williams, S. C. R., Parslow, D. M., Morgan, M. J., Morris, R. G., Bullmore, E. T., Baron-Cohen, S., & Gray, J. A. (2002) · Nature Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nn818 · Cited by 364
Individual Differences among Grapheme-Color Synesthetes: Brain-Behavior Correlations
Hubbard, E. M., Arman, A. C., Ramachandran, V. S., & Boynton, G. M. (2005) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.02.008 · Cited by 355
Cited by
Music–color associations are mediated by emotion
Palmer, S. E., Schloss, K. B., Xu, Z., & Prado-León, L. R. (2013) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1212562110 · Cited by 403
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): a flow-like mental state
Barratt, E. L., & Davis, N. J. (2015) · PeerJ · doi:10.7717/peerj.851 · Cited by 391
Misophonia: Physiological investigations and case descriptions
Edelstein, M., Brang, D., Rouw, R., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2013) · Frontiers in Human Neuroscience · doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00296 · Cited by 330
Near-future levels of ocean acidification reduce fertilization success in a sea urchin
Havenhand, J. N., Buttler, F.-R., Thorndyke, M. C., & Williamson, J. E. (2008) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.06.015 · Cited by 287
A Large-Scale Study of Misophonia
Rouw, R., & Erfanian, M. (2018) · Journal of Clinical Psychology · doi:10.1002/jclp.22500 · Cited by 262
Metadata
- Authors
- Simner, J., Mulvenna, C., Sagiv, N., Tsakanikos, E., Witherby, S. A., Fraser, C., Scott, K., & Ward, J.
- Venue
- Perception
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2006-08
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1024-1033
- ISSN
- 0301-0066 (ISSN-L)
- 1468-4233
- OpenAlex
- W1970794612
- Cited by
- 656
- References
- 31
- FWCI
- 30.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Synaesthesia: The Prevalence of Atypical Cross-Modal Experiences. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1068/p5469
- The paper
- Simner, J., Mulvenna, C., Sagiv, N., Tsakanikos, E., Witherby, S. A., Fraser, C., Scott, K., & Ward, J. (2006). Synaesthesia: The Prevalence of Atypical Cross-Modal Experiences. Perception. https://doi.org/10.1068/p5469
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
