Haptic perception in synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a relatively rare phenomenon that, after several decades of neglect, has recently begun to be investigated in the scientific community. Despite advances in knowledge regarding both the underlying neurophysiology and phenomenology, it is virtually still in exploratory stages. The purpose of this project was to investigate haptic perception in synaesthesia from several different angles. First, we focused on several recent findings involving mirror-touch synaesthesia (Blakemore etal, 2005 Banissy & Ward, 2007 Banissy etal, in prep.) that promise a better understanding of intersubjectivity, both in terms of emotion recognition and spatial body mapping. Furthermore, we sought to establish a measure of authentication for touch-vision synaesthesia and to determine whether there may exist heuristics for cross-modal mapping, between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes, that would have implications regarding the neural mechanisms of the phenomenon