Abstract
The last few years have seen an explosive growth of research interest in the crossmodal correspondences, the sometimes surprising associations that people experience between stimuli, attributes, or perceptual dimensions, such as between auditory pitch and visual size, or elevation. To date, the majority of this research has tended to focus on audiovisual correspondences. However, a variety of crossmodal correspondences have also been demonstrated with tactile stimuli, involving everything from felt shape to texture, and from weight through to temperature. In this review, I take a closer look at temperature-based correspondences. The empirical research not only supports the existence of robust crossmodal correspondences between temperature and colour (as captured by everyday phrases such as 'red hot') but also between temperature and auditory pitch. Importantly, such correspondences have (on occasion) been shown to influence everything from our thermal comfort in coloured environments through to our response to the thermal and chemical warmth associated with stimulation of the chemical senses, as when eating, drinking, and sniffing olfactory stimuli. Temperature-based correspondences are considered in terms of the four main classes of correspondence that have been identified to date, namely statistical, structural, semantic, and affective. The hope is that gaining a better understanding of temperature-based crossmodal correspondences may one day also potentially help in the design of more intuitive sensory-substitution devices, and support the delivery of immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences.
Highlights
There has been a rapid growth of interest in the topic of crossmodal correspondences in recent years
The results revealed that the imagined cold drink was associated with a soundtrack that was higher-pitched and had a significantly faster tempo than the imagined room-temperature drink
The results reported reveal that the colour of ambient lighting does have a small but significant effect on thermal comfort/temperature perception (Candas and Dufour, 2005; Fanger et al, 1977; Winzen et al, 2014)
Summary
There has been a rapid growth of interest in the topic of crossmodal correspondences in recent years. The majority of the research in this area has tended to focus on crossmodal correspondences between auditory and visual stimuli (Evans and Treisman, 2010; Parise and Spence, 2012; see Marks, 2004; Spence, 2011, 2018a, for reviews). A number of tactile crossmodal correspondences have been reported involving everything from felt shape/size (e.g., Walker and Smith, 1984, 1985, 1986) to texture and hardness (Ludwig and Simner, 2013; Slobodenyuk et al, 2015) (see Note 1), and from weight (Walker et al, 2017) through to temperature (e.g., Wang and Spence, 2017). Though, I want to take a closer look at temperature-based, or thermal, correspondences
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.