Charles Spence
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597663 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Spence |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Spence |
| SIGNATURE | SPENCE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2111-072X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
What role does temporal synchrony play in mid-level audiovisual crossmodal correspondences
Temporal synchrony is widely recognized as one of the key factors facilitating the emergence of crossmodal correspondences and affecting their crossmodal effects. However, several issues regarding the definition of temporal synchrony and the mechanisms underlying its crossmodal effects remain open, depending on the specific experimental/perceptual context/stimuli used, as well as the influence of crossmodal congruency and structural (including is…
No error on the side of safety: No representational momentum for auditory looming stimuli
The looming bias describes systematic differences in the perception of looming as compared to receding stimuli. To date, the most prominent and successful theory put forward to account for this bias is the adaptive bias theory, based on the more general error management theory framework, which argues for a perceptual bias for looming stimuli to err on the side of safety. We challenge this notion by providing evidence using the established probe c…
Auditory-conceptual associations in Peter and the Wolf and Carnival of the Animals: Evidence from 6- to 9-year-old children
This study investigated auditory-conceptual associations in children using complex audiovisual stimuli, namely musical excerpts from the Western classical repertoire and drawings. In Experiment 1, we examined whether 6- to 9-year old children were able to consistently match musical excerpts from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with corresponding black-and-white images of the characters. The results confirmed robust associations, particularly for t…
On sensory similarities
Similarity has been a central concern for millennia, drawing the attention of philosophers, scientists, and artists. The issue of similarity is especially intriguing in the domain of the senses (and of sensory perception), where considerable research effort has been devoted to describing the affinities and divergences between different sensory modalities. In this work, we critically review the multiple different ways in which 'sensory similarity'…
What motivate consumers’ purchase intention and the intention to continue watching in livestream shopping
A growing number of companies are adopting livestream shopping as a means of recommending their products to consumers. However, the question of whether the purchase intention for sustainable clothing amongst consumers can be increased by livestream shopping remains unclear. Therefore, the present study was designed to clarify the relationship between cognitive reactions (vividness, attractiveness, flow, and multisensory cues), emotion (arousal, p…
Combining typeface and color to prime specific taste expectations
The effects of color and typeface on people’s taste expectations have been well documented in the literature on crossmodal correspondences. However, research on the interaction between different visual features when they are collectively associated with specific taste qualities is scarce. Here, an online study is presented that examines the combined effect of color and typeface by simultaneously manipulating the color scheme and font curvilineari…
Assessing the limits on size-pitch mapping reveals the interplay between top-down and bottom-up influences on relative crossmodal correspondences
Smelling x as y? On (the impossibility of) multistable perception in the chemical senses
Multistable percepts are intriguing phenomena whereby an ambiguous sensory input can be perceived in one of several qualitatively different ways. In such cases, people can switch their attention to perceive the stimulus in either way, though they typically cannot maintain both interpretations in awareness simultaneously. The abundance of evidence demonstrating multistable perception in the visual and auditory modalities can be contrasted with the…
From the Intercellular to the Extraterrestrial: The Need for Interdisciplinary Spatial Study
There is a critical need to reframe the future study of socio-spatial relations. Current constructs connected to specific disciplinary traditions are often constrained by one-dimensional approaches. The purpose of this article is to share and provoke new forms of socio-spatial study premised on interdisciplinary exchanges. Lefebvre proposes that to discuss space is to analyze the interactions of material environments, mentalities, and social prac…
Crossmodal semantics in memory: Scoping review and meta-analyses of multisensory effects in short-term and episodic memory systems
The human brain represents objects and events in the environment by binding together their defining semantic attributes across the senses (e.g., vision, hearing, touch). Semantic relationships between these attributes in different senses, or crossmodal semantic relationships, are fundamental to carving out meaningful categories and to encode and store experiences in the form of memories for later retrieval. Unsurprisingly, the subject of crossmod…
Assessing the impact of exposure to nature on food perception and choice behaviour
In recent years, there has been growing interest in biophilia (otherwise known as the nature effect). However, the question of what exactly the effect of exposure to nature, through whichever sense(s) it happens to be experienced, has on people's food choices and multisensory flavour perception has received little attention from researchers to date. In this narrative historical review, we assess the effects of nature-related stimuli on people's f…
Craving what you imagine: How sensory mental imagery relates to trait food craving and BMI
Mental imagery (MI), particularly visual imagery, is thought to play a key role in inducing food cravings, yet its relationship with trait food craving and adiposity remains underexplored. This study investigated how MI for multiple senses is related to the individual food craving trait and BMI. Experiment 1, conducted with a cohort of 291 individuals, used a partial Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (PSI-Q) and the Food Craving Inventory. E…
Color–taste correspondences influence visual binding errors
People consistently associate tastes with colors (e.g., sweet-red, sour-yellow, salty-blue). Here, we examined the effect of the congruency of color-taste correspondences on unimodal visual feature binding by studying illusory conjunctions (binding errors). The visual stimuli were typical food words associated with sweet, sour, and salty tastes, and were presented in red, yellow, and blue font. The participants reported the font color of one of t…
Eudaimonia in Sourdough: Understanding Well-Being in the Sensory Experiences of Artisanal Activities
The well-being effects of artisanal food production activities remain understudied despite growing interest in the relation between well-being and food. A study was therefore designed to investigate the impact of taking part in a sourdough bread-making workshop on mood status, the hypothesis being that the rich multisensory stimulation involved might contribute positively to enhancing participants’ emotional states. A total of three sourdough mak…
The Ghost Train: A Disappearing Fairground Entertainment
The Ghost Train on the fairground connects pre-mechanized ghost shows (such as the Phantasmagoria and Dr. Pepper's Ghost type illusions) that had been popular in Britain in the latter half of the 19th century, with the increasingly mechanized rides that came to dominate the British fairground circuit during the 20th century. Intriguingly, although customers were moved along a track, the showmen themselves considered the Ghost Train to be a "show"…
Perceptual Similarity: Insights From Crossmodal Correspondences
Perceptual similarity is one of the most fiercely debated topics in the philosophy and psychology of perception. The documented history of the issue spans all the way from Plato – who regarded similarity as a key factor for human perceptual experience and cognition – through to contemporary psychologists – who have tried to determine whether, and if so, how similarity relationships can be established between stimuli both within and across the sen…
Prokofiev was (almost) right: A cross-cultural investigation of auditory-conceptual associations in Peter and the Wolf
Over recent decades, studies investigating cross-modal correspondences have documented the existence of a wide range of consistent cross-modal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness). Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex and realistic auditory stimuli and visually presented concepts (e.g., musical excerpts-animals). Surprisingly, however, there is little evidence…
What, if anything, can be considered an amodal sensory dimension
The term ‘amodal’ is a key topic in several different research fields across experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including in the areas of developmental and perception science. However, despite being regularly used in the literature, the term means something different to the researchers working in the different contexts. Many developmental scientists conceive of the term as referring to those perceptual qualities, such as, for exa…
Sensory translation between audition and vision
Across the millennia, and across a range of disciplines, there has been a widespread desire to connect, or translate between, the senses in a manner that is meaningful, rather than arbitrary. Early examples were often inspired by the vivid, yet mostly idiosyncratic, crossmodal matches expressed by synaesthetes, often exploited for aesthetic purposes by writers, artists, and composers. A separate approach comes from those academic commentators who…
Motion perception in touch: Resolving contradictory findings by varying probabilities of different trial types
Representational momentum describes the typical overestimation of the final location of a moving stimulus in the direction of stimulus motion. While systematically observed in different sensory modalities, especially vision and audition, in touch, empirical findings indicate a mixed pattern of results, with some published studies suggesting the existence of the phenomenon, while others do not. In the present study, one possible moderating variabl…
Colour/shape-taste correspondences across three languages in ChatGPT
Crossmodal correspondences, the tendency for a sensory feature / attribute in one sensory modality (either physically present or merely imagined), to be associated with a sensory feature in another sensory modality, have been studied extensively, revealing consistent patterns, such as sweet tastes being associated with pink colours and round shapes across languages. The present research explores whether such correspondences are captured by ChatGP…
Understanding Sense of Place: Insights from People’s Experiences at Pasar Baru, Bandung, Indonesia
Sense of place relates to the identity of a place or unique characteristics that create meanings for the people who experience it.This situation has the potential to initiate and enhance a person's attachment to a place and can be strengthened by the functioning of the human senses which can see, hear, smell, and feel everything that happens around them.In this context, this study explores sense of place in a vernacular place: Pasar Baru Bandung …
Music for Plants? An Investigation into the impact of Exposure to Acoustic Stimulus in Bok Choy (Brassica Rapa) Plants
The study aimed to investigate the influence of different types of acoustic stimulus (classical vs. rock music) on the growth of bok choy (Brassica rapa) plants. Three separate groups of bok choy plants were exposed to classical music, rock music, or else no music, during growth and development and the influence on yield was observed. The results reveal that those plants exposed to classical music exhibited significant differences in shoot charac…
Comparing the influence of visual information and the perceived intelligence of voice assistants when shopping for sustainable clothing online
In an effort to reduce the negative impact of clothing manufacturing on the environment, a number of international clothing brands have made strides towards engaging in more environmentally-sustainable behaviours. However, further research is still needed in order to understand the effects of these efforts on consumer perception and decision-making in the case of sustainable clothing. This study examines the role of visual information (VI) associ…
Orthonasal olfactory influences on consumer food behaviour
It is often suggested in the popular press that food chains deliberately introduce enticing product aromas into (and in the immediate vicinity of) their premises in order to attract customers. However, despite the widespread use of odours in the field of sensory marketing, laboratory research suggests that their effectiveness in modulating people's food behaviours depends on a range of contextual factors. Given the evidence that has been publishe…
Yummy” versus “Yucky”! Explicit and implicit approach–avoidance motivations towards appealing and disgusting foods
Colour, pleasantness, and consumption behaviour within a meal
Crossmodal correspondences between sounds and tastes
The weight of the container influences expected satiety, perceived density, and subsequent expected fullness
To what extent do Gestalt grouping principles influence tactile perception
Since their formulation by the Gestalt movement more than a century ago, the principles of perceptual grouping have primarily been investigated in the visual modality and, to a lesser extent, in the auditory modality. The present review addresses the question of whether the same grouping principles also affect the perception of tactile stimuli. Although, to date, only a few studies have explicitly investigated the existence of Gestalt grouping pr…
Orthonasal olfactory influences on consumer food behaviour
It is often suggested in the popular press that food chains deliberately introduce enticing product aromas into (and in the immediate vicinity of) their premises in order to attract customers. However, despite the widespread use of odours in the field of sensory marketing, laboratory research suggests that their effectiveness in modulating people's food behaviours depends on a range of contextual factors. Given the evidence that has been publishe…
From the fairground sensorium to the digitalization of bodily entertainment: Commercializing Multisensory Entertainments Involving the Bodily Senses
Entertaining the bodily senses by means of the deliberate stimulation of the proprioceptive, kinesthetic, and/or vestibular senses/systems has long been the focus of many of the (mechanical) rides found on the fairground and at the theme park. Although the history of kinaesthetic thrills and proprioceptive pleasures stretches back to the turn of the 20th Century, and, despite the growing interest in digital stimulation (e.g. virtual reality, the …
Tactile aesthetics: Towards a definition of its characteristics and neural correlates
The past few decades have seen a rapid rise in the popularity of studies addressing the cognitive and neural correlates of aesthetic judgments in humans. However, despite this growing trend, and despite the fact that artists have, over the centuries, exploited each and every one of the human senses for their communicative purposes, very little research has investigated this important topic from the point of view of the sense of touch. In this rev…
Crossmodal semantics in memory: Scoping review and meta-analyses of multisensory effects in short-term and episodic memory systems
The human brain represents objects and events in the environment by binding together their defining semantic attributes across the senses (e.g., vision, hearing, touch). Semantic relationships between these attributes in different senses, or crossmodal semantic relationships, are fundamental to carving out meaningful categories and to encode and store experiences in the form of memories for later retrieval. Unsurprisingly, the subject of crossmod…
Eudaimonia in Sourdough: Understanding Well-Being in the Sensory Experiences of Artisanal Activities
The well-being effects of artisanal food production activities remain understudied despite growing interest in the relation between well-being and food. A study was therefore designed to investigate the impact of taking part in a sourdough bread-making workshop on mood status, the hypothesis being that the rich multisensory stimulation involved might contribute positively to enhancing participants’ emotional states. A total of three sourdough mak…
Does the visual composition of a dish influence the perception of portion size and hedonic preference
Smooth operator”: Music modulates the perceived creaminess, sweetness, and bitterness of chocolate
Enhancing the experience of food and drink via neuroscience-inspired olfactory design
Olfactory cues, both orthonasal (when we inhale) and retronasal (when we swallow/breathe out from the back of the nose), play a crucial role in the experience, and enjoyment, of food and drink. However, the design of product packaging glassware, and even plateware has typically not been optimized to deliver the ideal orthonasal hit. This review highlights a number of recent attempts by packaging manufacturers to improve the orthonasal experience …
Auditory, tactile, and audiotactile information processing following visual deprivation
We highlight the results of those studies that have investigated the plastic reorganization processes that occur within the human brain as a consequence of visual deprivation, as well as how these processes give rise to behaviorally observable changes in the perceptual processing of auditory and tactile information. We review the evidence showing that visual deprivation affects the establishment of the spatial coordinate systems involved in the p…
That's My Hand! Activity in Premotor Cortex Reflects Feeling of Ownership of a Limb
When we look at our hands, we immediately know that they are part of our own body. This feeling of ownership of our limbs is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. We have studied the neuronal counterparts of this experience. A perceptual illusion was used to manipulate feelings of ownership of a rubber hand presented in front of healthy subjects while brain activity was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The neural activity …
Audiotactile multisensory interactions in human information processing
The last few years has seen a very rapid growth of interest in how signals from different sensory modalities are integrated in the brain to form the unified percepts that fill our daily lives. Research on multisensory interactions between vision, touch, and proprioception has revealed the existence of multisensory spatial representations that code the location of external events relative to our own bodies. In this review, we highlight recent conv…
The multisensory perception of flavor
The cognitive and neural correlates of “tactile consciousness”: A multisensory perspective
Is the exogenous orienting of spatial attention truly automatic? Evidence from unimodal and multisensory studies
The cognitive and neural correlates of tactile memory
Tactile memory systems are involved in the storage and retrieval of information about stimuli that impinge on the body surface and objects that people explore haptically. Here, the authors review the behavioral, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on tactile memory. This body of research reveals that tactile memory can be subdivided into a number of functionally distinct neurocognitive subsystems, just as is the case…
The science of interpersonal touch: An overview
Lost in the move? Secondary task performance impairs tactile change detection on the body
Prior-entry: A review
Grape expectations: The role of cognitive influences in color–flavor interactions
Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review
Implicit processing of tactile information: Evidence from the tactile change detection paradigm
Tactile aesthetics: Towards a definition of its characteristics and neural correlates
The past few decades have seen a rapid rise in the popularity of studies addressing the cognitive and neural correlates of aesthetic judgments in humans. However, despite this growing trend, and despite the fact that artists have, over the centuries, exploited each and every one of the human senses for their communicative purposes, very little research has investigated this important topic from the point of view of the sense of touch. In this rev…
To what extent do Gestalt grouping principles influence tactile perception
Since their formulation by the Gestalt movement more than a century ago, the principles of perceptual grouping have primarily been investigated in the visual modality and, to a lesser extent, in the auditory modality. The present review addresses the question of whether the same grouping principles also affect the perception of tactile stimuli. Although, to date, only a few studies have explicitly investigated the existence of Gestalt grouping pr…
Assessing the effects of audiovisual semantic congruency on the perception of a bistable figure
Crossmodal correspondences between sounds and tastes
The weight of the container influences expected satiety, perceived density, and subsequent expected fullness
How automatic are crossmodal correspondences
Attention modulates sensory suppression during back movements
Auditory, tactile, and audiotactile information processing following visual deprivation
We highlight the results of those studies that have investigated the plastic reorganization processes that occur within the human brain as a consequence of visual deprivation, as well as how these processes give rise to behaviorally observable changes in the perceptual processing of auditory and tactile information. We review the evidence showing that visual deprivation affects the establishment of the spatial coordinate systems involved in the p…
Textures that we like to touch: An experimental study of aesthetic preferences for tactile stimuli
Yummy” versus “Yucky”! Explicit and implicit approach–avoidance motivations towards appealing and disgusting foods
Colour, pleasantness, and consumption behaviour within a meal
Sensory expectations based on product-extrinsic food cues: An interdisciplinary review of the empirical evidence and theoretical accounts
Sensing the future of HCI: Touch, Taste, and Smell User Interfaces
Touch, taste, and smell are an underexplored design space in the context of interactive experiences. By understanding the ways in which our senses process information and how they relate to one another, it will be possible to create richer experiences for humantechnology interactions. We need to design interfaces that allow the stimulation of unexplored sensory inputs as well as interfaces that take into account the relationships between the sens…
Psychology (51 works) · Multisensory perception and integration (40 works) · Perception (39 works) · Neuroscience (38 works) · Cognitive psychology (37 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies (21 works) · Sensory system (20 works) · Crossmodal (17 works) · Visual perception (16 works)