For my STEAM project, I surveyed 10 people in the Emma Willard community to find out which ones had synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one stimulus triggers an unrelated stimulus in another sense. To do this, I asked them to pick which color they associated with a certain letter or number and repeated the process 1-2 months later. Synesthesia is consistent so if the colors associated with each letter and number stayed the same, it would mean that person was a synesthete. I found out that one of the participants had number-color synesthesia, and most non-synesthetes had an average of 1.5 out of 6 color associations that stayed the same. One thing that challenged me was actually making myself go up to people and ask them to participate in my project. I don’t like to inconvenience people and I have a really hard time going up to people. This part would have been the easiest for some people, but for me it was very difficult. I really enjoyed looking at the data because it was so visual. It was also fun to compare other people’s associations to my own. I would tell a future STEAM researcher to pick a project they are interested in and have fun doing it. I enjoyed my project a lot, and I would like to thank Ms. Harrison for being a great mentor.

In analyzing my data, I found that one of the participants had number-color synesthesia because both of the number-color associations stayed constant. Another interesting thing I learned is that the participants who were mostly non synesthetes had 0-3 constant associations. This is interesting because they should logically have either all constant or no constant associations. The constant associations could be because the participants had a non-synesthetic association with the letter or number, for example refrigerator magnets of a certain color as a child, or they could have been because the participants remembered the color they answered for the first test. There is not much that could be done to prevent the first source of error, but I could limit how many participants remembered their previous answers by spacing out the tests more than I actually did. I have begun to make my poster and it it really exciting to be making an actual scientific poster.