# SynesthesiaColorPicker: An open-source color picker for online synesthesia research

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source color picker tool to help researchers study synesthesia more consistently and easily.

## Contribution

The paper introduces SynesthesiaColorPicker, a mobile-friendly, open-source tool for synesthesia research that integrates with popular experiment platforms.

## Key findings

- SynesthesiaColorPicker can be used with minimal programming knowledge on platforms like Qualtrics and lab.js/Open Lab.
- The tool's design reduces methodological confounds compared to existing color picker methods.
- A comparison with the Synesthesia Battery confirms its effectiveness in overcoming known issues.

## Abstract

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 experience 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. SynesthesiaColorPicker is an open-source, mobile-friendly color picker tool that can be integrated with two popular online experiment platforms (Qualtrics and lab.js/Open Lab) without any prior programming knowledge. The templates, underlying JavaScript code, and detailed instructions are available for download on a GitHub repository. Furthermore, a comparison between data collected with SynesthesiaColorPicker and with the Synesthesia Battery shows that two methodological design choices in SynesthesiaColorPicker overcome measurable confounds in existing color picker methodology.