TY  - JOUR
A1  - Levitan, Carmel A.
A1  - Ren, Jiana
A1  - Woods, Andy T.
A1  - Boesveldt, Sanne
A1  - Chan, Jason S.
A1  - McKenzie, Kirsten J.
A1  - Dodson, Michael
A1  - Levin, Jai A.
A1  - Leong, Christine X. R.
A1  - Bosch, Jasper J. F. van den
T1  - Cross-cultural color-odor associations
T2  - PLoS One
N2  - Colors and odors are associated; for instance, people typically match the smell of strawberries to the color pink or red. These associations are forms of crossmodal correspondences. Recently, there has been discussion about the extent to which these correspondences arise for structural reasons (i.e., an inherent mapping between color and odor), statistical reasons (i.e., covariance in experience), and/or semantically-mediated reasons (i.e., stemming from language). The present study probed this question by testing color-odor correspondences in 6 different cultural groups (Dutch, Netherlands-residing-Chinese, German, Malay, Malaysian-Chinese, and US residents), using the same set of 14 odors and asking participants to make congruent and incongruent color choices for each odor. We found consistent patterns in color choices for each odor within each culture, showing that participants were making non-random color-odor matches. We used representational dissimilarity analysis to probe for variations in the patterns of color-odor associations across cultures; we found that US and German participants had the most similar patterns of associations, followed by German and Malay participants. The largest group differences were between Malay and Netherlands-resident Chinese participants and between Dutch and Malaysian-Chinese participants. We conclude that culture plays a role in color-odor crossmodal associations, which likely arise, at least in part, through experience.
Y1  - 2014
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/34556
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-345561
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Copyright: © 2014 Levitan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 9
IS  - (7):e101651
SP  - 1
EP  - 8
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -