Abstract
How can people imagine colors from smelling odors? We assumed that when people can name an odor correctly, they can imagine an appropriate color of the odor source through semantic imagery. The participants smelled 20 everyday odors and for each one chose imagined color from a hue-circle of 24 colors. They also named odors whenever they could. Only 8 odors could be associated with each color-category, and many of the 8 were named easily. However, people also could imagine colors from odors, whether the odors could be named or not. From this we can suggest that people would associate an odor with some inner semantic representations, even if they can't name the odor, then they could imagine colors in accordance with the representations.
