联觉是感官刺激或认知概念引起额外感知体验的现象。例如,在通常研究的联觉类型中,用黑色字体写的单词等刺激会引发其他颜色的体验,例如,红色。为了客观地验证联觉,参与者被要求为重复呈现的刺激选择颜色,并评估他们选择的一致性(一致性测试).以前,没有公开可用且易于使用的工具来分析一致性测试结果。这里,引入了R包synr,它为探索一致性测试数据和应用通用程序进行分析提供了有效的接口。重要的是,synr还实现了一种新颖的方法,能够识别分数无法解释的参与者,例如,他们只给出黑色或红色的反应。为此,基于密度的噪声应用空间聚类(DBSCAN)与3D空间中的传播度量一起应用。提出了具有预先存在的可公开访问数据的synr的应用,该应用说明了如何在实践中使用synr。还包括synr的数据验证程序和人工评级的比较,发现synr与人类评分有很高的对应关系,并且在人类评分者容易被误导的情况下表现优于人类评分者。讨论了广泛采用Synr的挑战以及在联觉领域和其他心理学研究领域使用Synr的建议。
Synesthesia is a phenomenon where sensory stimuli or cognitive concepts elicit additional perceptual experiences. For instance, in a commonly studied type of
synesthesia, stimuli such as words written in black font elicit experiences of other colors, e.g., red. In order to objectively verify
synesthesia, participants are asked to choose colors for repeatedly presented stimuli and the consistency of their choices is evaluated (consistency test). Previously, there has been no publicly available and easy-to-use tool for analyzing consistency test results. Here, the R package synr is introduced, which provides an efficient interface for exploring consistency test data and applying common procedures for analyzing them. Importantly, synr also implements a novel method enabling identification of participants whose scores cannot be interpreted, e.g., who only give black or red color responses. To this end, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is applied in conjunction with a measure of spread in 3D space. An application of synr with pre-existing openly accessible data illustrating how synr is used in practice is presented. Also included is a comparison of synr\'s data validation procedure and human ratings, which found that synr had high correspondence with human ratings and outperformed human raters in situations where human raters were easily mislead. Challenges for widespread adoption of synr as well as suggestions for using synr within the field of
synesthesia and other areas of psychological research are discussed.