Familiar Scents Can Change The Way We See Color

What you see is what you smell – at least according to a new study that shows that characteristic scents can influence the way that people perceive color. For example, smelling coffee makes everything look slightly more brown.

What happens when you look at an object? At the level of the human eye, scientists have a good grasp of what goes on. The physics, chemistry and biology of how an image is projected onto the retina is well-known by now. But what still continues to hold surprises is what happens next: How does the brain interpret the signals it gets from the eyes? A new research study published in Frontiers in Psychology now suggests that even smell has something to do with it.

To deal with the constant onslaught of information from all senses, the brain combines some of the input it gets. Taste and smell are closely linked, for example. Sound and vision are connected as well: hearing a sound can conjure up an image in the brain or provide expectations. But scent and vision are connected as well.

A research team from the University of Liverpool recently tested the connection between seeing and smell with 24 volunteers. They showed the volunteers a random color on a computer screen and asked them to use sliders to adjust the color to gray. While they were doing this, the researchers used a diffuser to pump one of six smells into the room: caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, peppermint or just neutral water as a control.

The volunteers did this task repeatedly, with different smells in the background. Every time they used the sliders to change the color on screen back to gray. But whether they actually landed on a neutral gray depended on the fragrance that was being diffused into the room.

“In a previous study, we had shown that the odor 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,” Ryan Ward, who led the study, told Frontiers.

In this new study, most of these same smells had an effect on how the volunteers perceived gray. If they smelled coffee, they saw gray as slightly brown, so they corrected it too far in the other direction.

“This ‘overcompensation’ suggests that the role of crossmodal associations in processing sensory input is strong enough to influence how we perceive information from different senses, here between odors and colors,” according to Ward.

Caramel, cherry, coffee and lemon all changed the way that people perceived the color gray. Water, as expected, had no effect. Only peppermint bucked the trend and didn’t quite match what the researchers predicted based on earlier findings.

This was just a small study with small effects so it doesn’t have all the answers yet. Ward said, “We need to know the degree to which odors influence color perception. For example, is the effect shown here still present for less commonly encountered odors, or even for odors encountered for the first time?”

If scent changes how we see the world, that could ultimately have possible implications for the way that shared spaces are designed, for example. It will be interesting to see – or smell? – what this discovery could lead to.

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