Nicholas Root

Background

About Nicholas Root

I’m an experimental psychologist with a background in psychophysics, linguistics, and data science. I study an extraordinary neural phenomenon called synesthesia, and use it as a tool to study how the brain structures our conscious experiences. I have two primary research interests:(1) using synesthetic touch-color associations as a model for sensory substitution in the blind, and (2) using synesthetic letter-color associations to study written language representation in the brain. When forced to choose the color that “goes best with” a particular haptic experience, synesthetes (and even non-synesthetes!) tend to associate certain haptic sensations with certain colors. These associations are not random: for example, stickier surfaces are often associated with greener colors. To understand these associations, we must understand how physical properties of materials (e.g, “adhesion”) relate to perceptual properties of touch (e.g, “stickiness”) and ultimately to perceptual properties of color (e.g, “hue”). In my current postdoc at the University of Amsterdam (funded by an NWO grant with Romke Rouw; in collaboration with Edward de Haan at Radboud University and the Lipomi Nanoengineering Lab at University of California San Diego), we combine the toolkits of haptic psychophysics and materials science to create a predictive model for “translation” between visual and haptic stimulus properties, and test the viability of using this approach to create vision-to-touch sensory substitution devices for the blind. When forced to choose the color that “goes best with” a particular letter, synesthetes (and even non-synesthetes!) tend to associate certain letters with certain colors. These associations are not random: for example, similarly-pronounced letters are often associated with similar colors. To understand these associations, we must understand how properties of a language (e.g, “orthographic depth”) moderate the relationship between properties of letters (e.g, “shared natural classes”) and properties of colors (e.g, “hue similarity”). In my previous postdoc at the University of Amsterdam (with Romke Rouw), we started an international consortium of synesthesia researchers and collected data from synesthetes in more than 20 of the world’s languages. We combined the toolkits of psychophysics and psycholinguistics to show that letter-color associations are influenced by linguistic properties, and are now using neuroimaging to test the viability of using this approach to explore broader questions about how the brain processes and represents written language.