Assessing colour-odour congruency using the Implicit Association Test
Poster Presentation

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

Daniel Sanabria
Department of Experimental Psychology - University of Oxford

Francesco Pavani
Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education - University of Trento

Charles Spence
Department of Experimental Psychology - University of Oxford

     Abstract ID Number: 141
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 21, 2005
     Presentation date: 06/07/2005 9:00 AM in MART Auditorium
     (View Schedule)

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.