Touching Emotions, Smelling Shapes: Exploring Tactile, Olfactory and Emotional Cross-sensory Correspondences in Preschool-aged Children

Paper Title

Touching Emotions, Smelling Shapes: Exploring Tactile, Olfactory and Emotional Cross-sensory Correspondences in Preschool-aged Children

Publication Info

• Topic area: Cross-sensory correspondences in preschool-aged children and their implications for design.
• Keywords: Cross-sensory correspondences, preschoolers, tactile stimuli, olfactory stimuli, emotion, sensory integration, child-computer interaction, multisensory design, developmental psychology, sensory HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Limited understanding of how preschool-aged children (2–4 years) form cross-sensory correspondences, particularly involving olfaction, touch, and emotion. Existing research focuses on older children and adults, leaving a gap in knowledge about early childhood sensory integration.
• Significance: Early childhood is a critical period for sensory development, and understanding cross-sensory correspondences can inform the design of multisensory technologies that support learning, communication, and emotional expression in young children.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has explored cross-sensory correspondences in older children and adults, such as the Bouba–Kiki effect and tactile–olfactory–emotional mappings. However, preschoolers’ sensory integration remains underexplored, particularly in relation to olfaction and emotion. This study addresses this gap by investigating how preschoolers form and explain these correspondences.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A study with 26 preschoolers using playful, story-based tasks to examine cross-sensory correspondences between tactile stimuli, olfactory stimuli, and emotions.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirical evidence of smell–touch–emotion correspondences in preschool-aged children.
  2. Development of a child-centered, story-based method for studying cross-sensory cognition.
  3. Design guidelines for creating multisensory technologies that align with preschoolers’ sensory integration.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Participants interacted with tactile stimuli (spiky, round, cylinder), smelled scents (lemon, vanilla, air), and assigned emotions (excited, calm, neither) in a randomized order.
  2. Tasks were embedded in a narrative to engage children and reduce cognitive demands.
  3. Data were collected through video recordings, transcriptions, and statistical analyses, including chi-square tests and residual analysis.
  4. Association strategies were coded to understand how children explained their correspondences.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Significant tactile–linguistic associations: Spiky with “Kiki” and Round with “Bouba” (χ² = 10.42, p = 0.034).
  • Significant olfactory–emotion associations: Lemon with excitement and vanilla with calm (χ² = 16.17, p < 0.005).
  • Significant tactile–olfactory associations: Spiky with lemon, Round with vanilla, and Cylinder with air (χ² = 31.38, p < 0.001).
  • No significant tactile–emotion associations (χ² = 8.85, p = 0.065).
• Advantage over baselines: Demonstrated that preschoolers exhibit systematic cross-sensory correspondences earlier than previously studied age groups, with some mappings (e.g., tactile–linguistic, olfactory–emotion) aligning with adult patterns.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants: 26 preschoolers (ages 2–4.5 years, M = 45.08 months).
  • Stimuli: 3D-printed tactile shapes, essential oil scents, and emotional categories.
  • Metrics: Chi-square tests for statistical significance, residual analysis for patterns, and qualitative coding of association strategies.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited range of stimuli; future studies could expand the variety of tactile and olfactory inputs.
  • Verbal responses excluded non-verbal children; future methods could include embodied or tangible response options.
  • Focused on tactile and olfactory domains; future research could explore taste and audition.
  • Longitudinal studies could trace developmental changes in cross-sensory correspondences.

Summary

This study investigated how preschool-aged children form cross-sensory correspondences between touch, smell, and emotion, revealing significant tactile–linguistic, tactile–olfactory, and olfactory–emotion mappings. The findings suggest that some correspondences, such as the Bouba–Kiki effect and olfactory–emotion links, emerge early and remain stable across development, while others, like tactile–emotion associations, are still developing. The study introduced a replicable, story-based method tailored to young children and provided design guidelines for multisensory technologies that align with preschoolers’ sensory integration. These insights have implications for designing educational, assistive, and emotionally expressive technologies for early childhood.