Assessing mechanisms behind crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature concepts.

Abstract

In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in crossmodal correspondences, including those involving temperature. However, only a few studies have explicitly examined the underlying mechanisms behind temperature-related correspondences. Here, we investigated the relative roles of an underlying affective mechanism and a semantic path (i.e., regarding the semantic knowledge related to a single common source identity or meaning) in crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature concepts using an associative learning paradigm. Two online experiments using visual textures previously shown to be associated with low and high thermal effusivity (Experiment 1) and visual textures with no consensual associations with thermal effusivity (Experiment 2) were conducted. Participants completed a speeded categorization task before and after an associative learning task, in which they learned mappings between the visual textures and specific affective or semantic stimuli related to low and high temperatures. Across the two experiments, both the affective and semantic mappings influenced the categorization of visual textures with the hypothesized temperatures, but there was no influence on the reaction times. The effect of learning semantic mappings was larger than that of affective ones in both experiments, suggesting that a semantic path has more weight than an affective mechanism in the formation of the associations studied here. The associations studied here could be modified through associative learning establishing correlations between visual textures and either affective or semantic stimuli.

Crossmodal compensation: Sensory discomfort affects consumer preferences across modalities

“…That is, we did not disentangle if or when our manipulations were based on a perceptual match between object features across modalities (crossmodal correspondences) or based on product features sharing a common identity (semantic congruency). Future research might extend the findings of the present studies by more closely examining the underlying source of the crossmodal association (e.g., Barbosa Escobar et al, 2023), and exploring whether there are idiosyncrasies in the manifestation of discomfort-driven crossmodal compensation depending on whether this source is semantic congruency or a crossmodal correspondence.…”

“…Individuals also crossmodally link object features that share an identity or meaning—a phenomenon known as semantic congruence (Alvarado et al, 2023; Barbosa Escobar et al, 2023). For example, people associate animals with certain sounds (e.g., dogs and barking; Chen & Spence, 2010), banana scent with the color yellow (Spence & Levitan, 2021), and certain scents acquire a feminine or masculine identity due to their associations with women's and men's products, respectively (Krishna, Elder, et al, 2010).…”

“…Individuals also crossmodally link object features that share an identity or meaning-a phenomenon known as semantic congruence (Alvarado et al, 2023;Barbosa Escobar et al, 2023). For example, people associate animals with certain sounds (e.g., dogs and barking;…”

Inducing Novel Sound–Taste Correspondences via an Associative Learning Task

“…In general, literature explicitly studying the underlying mechanisms of crossmodal associations is scarce. That being said, Barbosa Escobar, Velasco, Byrne, and Wang (2023) recently investigated the relative influence of two different mechanisms in the context of crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature using an associative learning paradigm. In the present paper, we aimed to fill this gap in the literature related to sound-taste correspondences.…”