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In spring, in the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona, there is an abundance of different wild flowers. It is a delight for the sense of smell and also for contemplation of the different shades of color.
These photographs that I have captured for La Vanguardia's Readers' Photos lead me to ask you the following: Does smell influence how we see colors? Well the answer is yes.
“Our brain constantly combines multisensory information from our environment. Odors, for example, are often perceived through visual cues; These sensations interact to form our own subjective experience,” explain the authors of the study Odors modulate the appearance of color, published by the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
According to the four scientists from Liverpool John Moores University and Cambridge University participating in this research, “this integration process can have a profound impact on the resulting experience and can alter our subjective reality.”
Cross-modal correspondences are consistent associations between stimulus features in different sensory modalities. “These correspondences are assumed to be bidirectional in nature and have been shown to influence our perception in a variety of different sensory modalities,” he notes.
In this way, they point out that “vision is dominant in our multisensory perception and can influence how we perceive information in our other senses, including smell.”
They reached this conclusion after exploring “the effect that different smells have on human color perception.” They did this by “presenting olfactory stimuli while asking observers to adjust a color patch to be toneless (neutral gray task).”
“We found that a shift in the perceived neutral gray point is biased toward warmer colors,” they explain, “for example, when observers were asked to perform the neutral gray color task while presenting the cherry odor, the perceptually achromatic stimulus. “It was skewed toward a reddish brown.”
“Using an achromatic matching task, we were able to demonstrate a small but systematic effect of the presence of odors on human color perception,” conclude researchers Ryan J. Ward, Maliha Ashraf, Sophie Wuerger and Alan Marshall.
