Self-organizing learning account of number-form synaesthesia

摘要

Some people automatically and involuntarily "see" mental images of numbers in spatialarrays when they think of numbers. This phenomenon, called number forms, shares threekey characteristics with the other types of synaesthesia, within-individual consistency,between-individual variety, and mixture of regularity and randomness. A theoreticalframework called SOLA (self-organizing learning account of number forms) is proposed,which explains the generation process of number forms and the origin of those three char-acteristics. The simulations replicated the qualitative properties of the shapes of numberforms, the property that numbers are aligned in order of size, that discontinuity usuallyoccurs at the point of carry, and that continuous lines tend to have many bends.