The sense of smell influences people’s perception of colors.

The sense of smell changes the colors we see—associations between smells and colors can be particularly strong: powerful enough to distort color perception.

.in_text_content_22 { width: 300px; height: 600px; } @media(min-width: 600px) { .in_text_content_22 { width: 580px; height: 400px; } }

This is evidenced by the results of a recent study by scientists from Liverpool John Moores University (UK), Frontiers reports.

Our five senses bombard us with information about our environment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of the ways our brains make sense of this abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, pitch, color and musical dimensions.

This sensory integration also causes us to associate higher temperatures with warm colors, lower pitches with lower pitches, and colors with the taste of certain foods, such as the taste of oranges with the same color, the article notes.

Such unconscious “cross-modal” associations with our sense of smell can also influence our color perception. To test this, the scientists conducted an experiment in which 24 adult women and men aged 20 to 57 years old who did not have color blindness or smell impairment took part.

• Participants sat in front of a screen in a room devoid of unwanted sensory stimuli. They didn’t wear deodorant or perfume;
• all odors in the isolated room were removed using an air purifier within four minutes;
• then one of six scents (chosen at random from caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon and mint, plus unscented water as a control) was broadcast into the room for five minutes. They were chosen because earlier experiments had already shown that the scent of caramel is usually associated with dark brown and yellow, coffee with dark brown and red, cherry with pink, red and purple, mint with green and blue, and lemon with yellow. , green and pink;
• Participants were shown a screen that showed a square filled with a random color (from an infinite range) and were asked to manually adjust two sliders—one for yellow to blue and one for green to red—to change its color to a neutral gray;
• Once the final choice was recorded, the procedure was repeated until all odors had been presented five times.

The results showed that participants had a weak but significant tendency to move one or both sliders too far from neutral gray. That is, the presence of odor distorted participants’ color perception:

• for example, when participants smelled coffee, they mistakenly perceived “gray” as a more reddish-brown color than the true neutral gray;
• similarly, when people smelled caramel, they misperceived the yellow-enriched color as gray;
• As expected, participants’ choices also matched the true gray color when presented with the neutral odor of water;
• The exception was the scent of mint, where participants’ hue selection differed from the typical cross-modal association demonstrated for other odors.

These results show that gray color perception tended to show the expected cross-modal consistency for four of the five odors, namely lemon, caramel, cherry and coffee, the researchers noted.

According to the scientists, this “overcompensation” suggests that the role of cross-modal associations in sensory information processing is strong enough to influence how we perceive the world around us.

Source: Frontiers

Source: Racurs

David

I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.