JAPANESE JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS
Online ISSN : 1882-8949
Print ISSN : 1882-8817
ISSN-L : 1882-8817
Special Issue
Imagining odor color
Haruko SugiyamaTadashi Kikuchi
Author information
JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

2009 Volume 17 Issue 2 Pages 103-111

Details
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.
Content from these authors
© 2009 JAPAN SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top