Odors can affect how human beings view colors, with particular fragrances causing foreseeable color associations, according to a current research study. Further research study is required to comprehend the degree of these sensory interactions.
Unconscious associations with smell can misshape the understanding of colors.
Our 5 senses bombard us with ecological input 24/ 7. One method our brain understands this abundance of details is by integrating details from 2 or more senses, such as in between smells and the smoothness of textures, pitch, color, and musical measurements. This sensory combination likewise triggers us to associate greater temperature levels with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less raised positions, and colors with the taste of specific foods– for instance, the taste of oranges with the color of the very same name.
Now, a research study just recently released in Frontiers in Psychology has actually revealed experimentally that such unconscious ‘crossmodal’ associations with our sense of odor can impact our understanding of colors.
“Here we show that the presence of different odors influences how humans perceive color,” stated lead author Dr Ryan Ward, a senior speaker at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK.
Sensory- denied space
Ward and associates evaluated for the presence and strength of odor-color associations in 24 adult females and males in between 20 and 57 years of age. The individuals were seated in front of a screen in a space lacking undesirable sensory stimuli throughout of the experiments. They used no antiperspirants or fragrances, and none reported being color-blind or having an impaired sense of odor.
All ambient smells in the seclusion space were purged with an air cleanser for 4 minutes. Then among 6 smells (selected at random from caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, and peppermint, plus odor-free water as a control) was relayed into the space with an ultrasonic diffuser for 5 minutes.
“In a previous study, we had shown that the odor of caramel commonly constitutes a crossmodal association with dark brown and yellow, just 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,” described Ward.
Participants existed with a screen that revealed them a square filled with a random color (from a boundless variety) and were welcomed to by hand change 2 sliders– one for yellow to blue, and another for green to red– to alter its color to neutral grey. After the last option had actually been taped, the treatment was duplicated, till all smells had actually existed 5 times.
Overcompensating for unconscious associations
The results revealed that individuals had a weak however considerable propensity to change one or both of the sliders too far from neutral grey. For example, when provided with the smell of coffee, they incorrectly viewed ‘grey’ to be more of a red-brown color than real neutral grey. Likewise, when provided with the smell of caramel, they incorrectly viewed a color improved in blue as grey. The existence of the odor hence misshaped the individuals’ color understanding in a foreseeable way.
An exception was when the smell of peppermint existed: here, the individuals’ option of shade was various from the normal crossmodal association showed for the other smells. As anticipated, the individuals’ choice similarly represented real grey when provided with the neutral aroma of water.
“These results show that the perception of grey tended towards their anticipated crossmodal correspondences for four out of five scents, namely lemon, caramel, cherry, and coffee,” stated Ward.
“This ‘overcompensation’ suggests that the role of crossmodal associations in processing sensory input is strong enough to influence how we perceive information from different senses, here between odors and colors.”
Questions stay
The scientists highlight the requirement to examine how significant such crossmodal associations in between smells and colors are.
“We need to know the degree to which odors influence color perception. For example, is the effect shown here still present for less commonly encountered odors, or even for odors encountered for the first time?” stated Ward.
Reference: “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.20231175703
