Blue Meat and Clever Research

Cognitive Daily reviews some really clever research on synesthesia, the phenomenon of associating words with colors, as well as other multimodal associations (not to be confused with its poor cousin sound symbolism). For example, there are people who will experience seeing the color blue when they hear the word meat (the actual word-color associations are not fixed or predictable, as far as I know). There is neuroscience research suggesting that people who experience this have some sort of overlap in processing areas for the word-color pairs (read an excellent roundup of the research here at NeuroLogica Blog). But this is a difficult area to study because there are so few true synesthetes and their experiences are inconsistent.

Bargary et al. 2009 wanted to discover when the color association was triggered in the time course of lexical recognition. Exactly how were they going to track that?