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

2026-03-09

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in the understanding of cross-sensory correspondences between touch, smell, and emotion in preschool children aged 2–4 years. Employing a gamified experimental paradigm combined with behavioral observation and qualitative analysis, this work systematically uncovers the mapping patterns between multimodal sensory inputs and emotional responses in this age group for the first time. The findings reveal significant correspondences between tactile and olfactory stimuli as well as between sensory modalities and emotions, and further identify the cognitive strategies young children use to construct such cross-sensory associations. These results not only fill a theoretical void in developmental psychology regarding early multisensory integration but also yield child-centered design guidelines and a reproducible methodological framework, offering foundational support for affective computing and child–computer interaction research.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Humans and AI: Brain-Sensing and Analysis

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning

Abstract

The use of a wide range of sensory modalities is increasingly central to technologies for learning, communication, and affective regulation. During the preschool years, sensory integration develops rapidly, shaping how children perceive and make sense of their environments. A key component of this process is cross-sensory correspondence: the systematic ways in which perceptions in different sensory modalities influence one another. Despite its relevance, little is known about cross-sensory correspondences in preschool-aged children (2-4 years). We present a study with 26 preschoolers examining smell-touch-emotion correspondences through playful tasks. We found significant correspondences both between sensory modalities and between sensory modalities and affective judgements. Further analysis revealed association strategies underpinning these mappings. We contribute empirical insights into cross-sensory correspondences in early childhood, design guidelines that align with how preschoolers relate sensory input, and a replicable method for probing cross-sensory cognition in this age group.

Problem

• cross-sensory correspondence
• preschool children
• olfaction
• touch
• emotion

Innovation

• cross-sensory correspondence
• preschool children
• multisensory interaction
• affective mapping
• replicable methodology