Abstract

Although sounds are commonly referred to as high or low notes, and odours as top/head or base notes, only in the case of pitch height an association with behavioural consequences has been widely demonstrated between tones and spatial elevation. Here we report a spatial stimulus-response compatibility effect in a classification task on olfactory stimuli, with faster responses to fruity odours (lemon, bergamot, orange) with the upper response button and to gourmand odours (coffee, caramel, vanilla) with the lower response button. The effect did not correlate with subjective judgments on heaviness-lightness, intensity and pleasantness of the stimuli. The well-known crossmodal correspondences between odours and tones, which can hardly be explained as internalisations of statistical regularities, may thus be mediated by access to a common mental representation of space.