Human brain constantly combines multisensory information from our surrounding environment. Odors for instance are often perceived with visual cues; these sensations interact to form our own subjective experience. This integration process can have a profound impact on the resulting experience and can alter our subjective reality. Vision is dominant in our multisensory perception and can influence how we perceive information in our other senses, including olfaction. In new research, scientists from Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Liverpool and Cambridge University explored the effect that different odors have on human color perception by presenting olfactory stimuli while asking observers to adjust a color patch to be devoid of hue.
In our everyday life, we are simultaneously bombarded with information from different sensory modalities.
Our brain combines this information to better understand our surrounding environment; this integration process has been shown to influence our perception in different senses, for example.
Crossmodal correspondences are the tendency for a sensory attribute to be associated with a stimulus feature in a different sensory modality.
For instance, people have consistent correspondences between odors and a variety of different sensory modalities, including but not limited to the angularity of shapes, the smoothness of texture, pitch, colors, and musical dimensions.
These correspondences still occur outside of olfaction, including, but not limited to, sound-taste, temperature-color, and pitch-vertical position.
The nature and origin of these correspondences have diverse characterization in the literature with hedonics, semantics, and natural co-occurrence being frequently deducted.
In their new study, Liverpool John Moores University researcher Ryan Ward and colleagues tested for the existence and strength of odor-color associations in 24 adult women and men between 20 and 57 years of age.
The participants were…
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