SynesthesiaColorPicker: an open-source color picker for online synesthesia research

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which healthy individuals experience additional, automatic, and consistent perceptions unrelated to veridical sensory input. For most (but not all) synesthetes, this additional sensation is a color: for example, grapheme-color synesthetes experience colors for letters of the alphabet. Measuring these color associations is of central importance to synesthesia research, but there is no standard color picker “tool” that researchers can adapt to use in their own experiments: each researcher must code their own. This is a barrier to entry for synesthesia research, and additionally creates potential methodological confounds because different researchers make color pickers with different properties. Here, I present SynesthesiaColorPicker, an open-source, mobile-friendly color picker tool that can be integrated with two popular online experiment platforms (Qualtrics and LabJS/ Open Lab) without any prior programming knowledge. The templates, underlying JavaScript code, and detailed instructions are available for download on a GitHub repository. I then use experimental data to show how two methodological design choices in SynesthesiaColorPicker overcome measurable confounds in existing color picker methodology.