Assessing colour-odour congruency using the Implicit Association Test

M. Luisa Demattè, Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education - University of Trento

Abstract
To date, few studies have attempted to study the nature of any crossmodal associations between colours and odours. What’s more, all previous studies in this area have relied on people explicitly matching specific colours to odours. In the present study, we investigated whether associations between odours and colours are robust enough to affect performance using an indirect measure of association (the Implicit Association Test). The use of the IAT has the advantage that participants are not directly asked about their colour-odour associations. Instead, people made speeded discrimination responses to a random sequence of visual (pink vs. turquoise) and olfactory (strawberry vs. spearmint) target stimuli. Participants responded more rapidly (and made fewer errors) when matching colours and odours (e.g., the strawberry odour and the pink colour) shared the same response key than when they did not (e.g., when the strawberry odour was paired with the turquoise colour). These findings demonstrate that systematic and robust associations exist between odours and colours, and provide a novel crossmodal extension of the IAT.

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