Alphabets in space!
Some people - including me! - think of the letters of the alphabet as having positions in space, something known as alphabet-space synaesthesia. At the time we did this research, very little was known about alphabet-space synaesthesia, beyond the fact of its existence. In this study, I worked with Alisdair Taylor, Sam Hutton, Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn and Jamie Ward to understand it better.
First, we looked at the different layouts that different people have. I was particularly interested in seeing whether the Alphabet Song (the one that a lot of English-speaking children learn which goes, “A B C D E F G/H I J K/L M N O P/Q R S/T U V/W X/Y and Z,” to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) had affected line breaks, direction changes and other features of the layouts for both English-speaking and German-speaking synaesthetes. Though the German speakers mostly hadn’t learned the Alphabet Song, both they and the English speakers tended to have features at the points where there’s a new line in the song, which might mean that both synaesthesia and the Alphabet Song reflect our tendency to chunk things up in order to make it easier to recall them - think about trying to remember a phone number. Strangely, though, our second experiment showed that synaesthetes don’t seem to use their spatial layouts to navigate the alphabet in tasks like figuring out what letter comes immediately before or after O - like everyone else, we seem to rely on the verbal memory of the Alphabet Song, even when it conflicts with our synaesthesia.
Lastly, we looked at whether a letter could direct someone’s attention in a particular direction, using an eye movement tracker. We showed participants a letter on a screen followed by a dot to the left or the right of the letter. The participants’ task was to move their gaze from the letter to the dot as quickly as possible. In the past, other researchers had shown that synaesthetes with spatial layouts for months would react more quickly if the position of the month and the dot were congruent (for example, if the month was on the left of their layout and the dot was to the left of the month). People who don’t have spatial layouts for months don’t show this kind of behaviour. We found exactly the same difference between alphabet-space synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes, which suggests that synaesthetes are unusual in having their attention directed by the appearance of a letter.