The infant as synesthete?

Abstract The hypothesis that newborns’ perception is synesthetic holds up well in light of recent evidence on the neural basis of synesthesia, on developmental plasticity, and on cross-modal interactions in non-synesthetic adults and children. The starting point for this paper is our previous proposal that newborns’ perception is synesthetic: that their undifferentiated sensory pathways lead to cross-modal influences on their perception resulting in perceptual experiences that resemble, in some respects, the perception of adults with synesthesia (Maurer 1993; Maurer and Maurer 1988; Maurer and Mondloch 1996, 2004; see Johnson and Vecera 1996, for a similar argument they called the parcellation conjecture).