Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Scented Colours: Artistic Interest In The Crossmodal Connection Between Colour And Odour, Charles Spence

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Artists have long been interested in the crossmodal links that exist between colour and scent. While traditionally envisioned as a kind of synaesthesia, contemporary accounts of the connections between this particular pair of senses have typically focused on explanations in terms of involuntarily-induced crossmodal mental imagery and crossmodal correspondences instead. A large body of empirical research now supports the view that the majority of non-synaesthetic individuals do indeed systematically match colours to odours, via semantic (or source-object based) matching, and/or on the basis of emotional-mediation or perceptual similarity. Universal agreement with regard to the best- matching colours for odours is, …