Elsevier

Brain and Language

Volume 79, Issue 2, November 2001, Pages 309-320
Brain and Language

Regular Article
The Color of Odors

https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.2001.2493Get rights and content

Abstract

The interaction between the vision of colors and odor determination is investigated through lexical analysis of experts' wine tasting comments. The analysis shows that the odors of a wine are, for the most part, represented by objects that have the color of the wine. The assumption of the existence of a perceptual illusion between odor and color is confirmed by a psychophysical experiment. A white wine artificially colored red with an odorless dye was olfactory described as a red wine by a panel of 54 tasters. Hence, because of the visual information, the tasters discounted the olfactory information. Together with recent psychophysical and neuroimaging data, our results suggest that the above perceptual illusion occurs during the verbalization phase of odor determination.

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  • Cited by (0)

    We thank Professor Patrick Mac Leod for his helpful support. This study was supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, and the Université Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2.

    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Gil Morrot, Unité de Recherche Biopolymères et Arômes, Centre INRA de Montpellier, 2 Place Viala, 34 060 Montpellier, France.

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