Odors can affect how humans view colors, with specific scents resulting in foreseeable color associations, according to a recent research study. More research is required to comprehend the extent of these sensory interactions.
Unconscious associations with smell can misshape the understanding of colors.
Our five senses bombard us with ecological input 24/7. One way our brain understands this abundance of details is by integrating information from 2 or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, pitch, color, and musical dimensions. This sensory combination likewise causes us to associate greater temperature levels with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less raised positions, and colors with the flavor of particular foods– for example, the taste of oranges with the color of the exact same name.
Now, a research study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology has actually revealed experimentally that such unconscious crossmodal associations with our sense of smell can affect our perception of colors.
” Here we show that the existence of various smells affects how people view color,” said lead author Dr Ryan Ward, a senior speaker at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK.
This sensory combination also causes us to associate higher temperatures with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less elevated positions, and colors with the taste of particular foods– for example, the taste of oranges with the color of the exact same name.
When provided with the smell of coffee, they wrongly viewed grey to be more of a red-brown color than real neutral grey. When presented with the odor of caramel, they mistakenly viewed a color enhanced in blue as grey. The existence of the smell therefore distorted the individuals color perception in a foreseeable way.
” We require to know the degree to which smells influence color perception.
Sensory-deprived space
Ward and coworkers evaluated for the presence and strength of odor-color associations in 24 adult ladies and men between 20 and 57 years of age. The participants were seated in front of a screen in a space without undesirable sensory stimuli for the period of the experiments. They wore no antiperspirants or perfumes, and none reported being color-blind or having an impaired sense of smell.
All ambient smells in the seclusion room were purged with an air purifier for 4 minutes. One of six smells (picked at random from caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, and peppermint, plus odor free water as a control) was relayed into the room with an ultrasonic diffuser for five minutes.
” In a previous research study, we had shown that the odor of caramel typically makes up a crossmodal association with dark brown and yellow, much like coffee with dark brown and red, cherry with pink, red, and purple, peppermint with green and blue, and lemon with yellow, green, and pink,” explained Ward.
Individuals existed with a screen that revealed them a square filled with a random color (from a limitless variety) and were welcomed to manually adjust 2 sliders– one for yellow to blue, and another for green to red– to change its color to neutral grey. After the last option had been recorded, the treatment was duplicated, till all smells had actually been provided 5 times.
Overcompensating for unconscious associations
The results revealed that individuals had a significant but weak propensity to adjust one or both of the sliders too far away from neutral grey. When provided with the smell of coffee, they incorrectly viewed grey to be more of a red-brown color than true neutral grey. When presented with the odor of caramel, they wrongly viewed a color enriched in blue as grey. The presence of the smell thus misshaped the individuals color understanding in a foreseeable way.
An exception was when the odor of peppermint existed: here, the individuals option of shade was different from the typical crossmodal association showed for the other smells. As expected, the participants choice also corresponded to real grey when presented with the neutral fragrance of water.
” These outcomes show that the understanding of grey tended towards their expected crossmodal correspondences for four out of five scents, specifically lemon, cherry, coffee, and caramel,” said Ward.
” This overcompensation suggests that the function of crossmodal associations in processing sensory input is strong enough to influence how we perceive information from various senses, here between colors and odors.”
Concerns remain
The researchers stress the requirement to investigate how far-reaching such crossmodal associations between odors and colors are.
” We require to understand the degree to which odors influence color understanding. For instance, is the result revealed here still present for less commonly encountered odors, or even for smells experienced for the very first time?” stated Ward.
Recommendation: “Odors modulate color appearance” by Ryan J. Ward, Maliha Ashraf, Sophie Wuerger and Alan Marshall, 6 October 2023, Frontiers in Psychology.DOI: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2023.1175703.