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Colours and smell: Welcome back to “Science For Everyone”, ABP Live’s weekly science column. Last week, we discussed what Disease X is, and how deadly it is compared to Ebola. This week, we will look at an intriguing study, which has found that odours we smell influence how we perceive different colours.
If we have smelt a certain odour, it can change the way we perceive a familiar colour, according to the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology.
Our senses and their associations
We have five senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. What may be less well-known to many is that most people tend to associate stimuli from one sense with the stimuli of another. For example, many people associate high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects that are located high in space. In another example of associations between vision and sound, people tend to associate round shapes with “soft consonants” (such as m and l) and “back vowels” such as u, while associating angular shapes with “hard consonants” (such as t and k) and “front vowels” (such as i).
In fact, studies have shown that people consistently make the same kinds of associations between sounds and tastes too. For example, studies have shown that most people associate piano notes with a sweet taste and sounds from brass instruments with bitterness and sourness.
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These associations are called crossmodal correspondences. A growing field of study, crossmodal correspondences happen because our brain makes sense of our surroundings by processing a number of signals simultaneously. The latest study, therefore, examines crossmodal correspondence between our perceptions of smell and vision.
The new study
The study comes at a time when the subject of colours is already in the news. On October 4, the 2023 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three scientists for their groundbreaking research on quantum dots, which are particles that are so small that many of their properties depend on their size. These properties include colour. At the nanoscale, two objects made of the same material can appear in two different colours if they are different in size.
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In the latest study, 24 women and men were seated in front of a screen. They wore no deodorants or perfumes so that those smells would not influence anyone’s perceptions of odour. The researchers then diffused any one of six odours (caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, peppermint, odourless water) into the room for five minutes.
The participants were then shown a coloured square (the colour was random) and were invited to change its colour to grey by manually adjusting a pair of sliders. This procedure was repeated several times for all odours that were diffused into the room.
The findings
The results showed that the odours they had smelt influenced how they adjusted the colour sliders. For example, after smelling coffee, they wrongly perceived “grey“ to be a red-brown colour and placed the slider there. When they smelt caramel, what they perceived as grey was actually a bluish colour.
“In a previous study, we had shown that the odour 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,” lead author Dr Ryan Ward at Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement released by Frontiers, the publishers of the journal.
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In the new study, there were a couple of exceptions. When they smelt peppermint, their choice of colour was different from the typical associations shown for the other odours. When they smelt odourless water, they correctly chose true grey.
“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,” Ward was quoted as saying.
The researchers, however, stressed that it was necessary to investigate how far-reaching such crossmodal associations between odours and colours are.
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