I have gotten data from 10 people for the first round. It is really interesting to look at the patterns of what colors people associate with different letters/numbers. For example, J has a lot of pinks and purples while 8 has a lot of green. I am not sure if that is coincidence, or an actual pattern. It is true that synesthetes associate certain colors with certain letters and numbers more often (vowels tend to be lighter for example), so maybe it is a pattern, even though most of those I surveyed are statistically not going to be synesthetes. I have been wondering how to analyze my data after I have the second round. How close do colors need to be to be counted as the same? I found an alphabet and numbers that I had assigned to their color in my head from two years ago. Here it is: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz,12345678910. This is very similar to the alphabet and numbers that I had changed to the color in my head from a few weeks ago which is here: 123456789, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. This might be a good clue as to how similar of a color to make the cut off, since almost all of them are very similar, and this is over 2 years for me compared to a few weeks for the participants. I will soon start to get the second round of data. It will be interesting to see how much peoples’ colors have changed.

I have begun asking people to answer the quiz that I made. My procedure is to go up to other students that I will be able to easily see again, often during a free grab block, and asking them “Do you mind answering a few questions to help me with my STEM project?” Then, I would open up the color selector on google docs (it is what you get when you select custom after going to the drop down menu to change a color) and saying “What color do you most closely associate with…?” If they seemed confused by this question or were having a hard time picking a color for the letter/number, I would say “Just pick the first color that pops into your head.” I had them pick colors for two numbers, four letters, and one note played on google guitar. When playing the note, I would cover up the screen because the string turns blue when it is played and I didn’t want that to influence the participant’s choice. Once the participant selected the color, I wrote down the code for the number on a piece of paper. One problem I faced was that I would accidentally copy the number wrong so it would not produce a color when I typed it back into the box. I was not sure whether to re-ask the person, throw away their data completely, throw away their data for that type of synesthesia, or try to just use data from the other letters/numbers to determine if they have synesthesia. After consideration, I have decided to just use the data from the other numbers and letters. Now I need to gather information from more people and then move on to the second round after March break.