They also sat in front of a screen filled with a random color, whilst an ultrasonic diffuser pumped one of six odors into the room – caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, peppermint, or water as a control – for five minutes. Using two sliders, participants were then asked to manually adjust the color on the screen to what they perceived to be true neutral gray.
The study found that people had a weak but significant tendency to shift the color too far away from neutral gray, in different but predictable ways depending on the scent – except for peppermint. The smell of coffee made participants perceive gray as a more red-brown color, whilst caramel led to more of a yellow-brown. To be expected given their respective dullness, odorless water corresponded to true neutral gray.
– Read more in Our Sense Of Smell Changes How We See Color at IFLScience.
Fascinating! I would be very interested to know the results of any future studies on this topic.
The “except for peppermint” is the really surprising one to me!
I’m not sure that peppermint really has a strong color association, although the article claims it has associations with blue and green, although I think those are probably not as strong as the color associations for coffee, caramel, and cherries. Coffee isn’t just linked with reddish-brown in people’s minds, it IS reddish brown, both the roasted beans and the brewed beverage, so I think just about everyone would associate coffee with brown. Caramel is yellow-brown, lemons are yellow, and cherries are usually red. Peppermint candies are often striped red-and-white, but sometimes peppermint flavored things are just white, as with the mint filling in peppermint patties. After dinner mints and butter mints come in a variety of colors, while peppermint itself (the herb) is green. I wonder if many of the participants associated peppermint with white, or else had a range of color associations.