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

2026. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Tegan Roberts-Morgan, Min Susan Li, Priscilla Lo, Zhuzhi Fan, Dan Bennett & Oussama Metatla.

Multisensory design principles are increasingly seen as central in the design of technologies for learning, communication, and affective regulation. Multisensory integration, the process by which we combine information from different senses, develops rapidly in the preschool years, shaping processes of perception and sense-making. In particular, this may impact cross-sensory correspondence, how perceptions in different sensory modalities influence one another, a key issue in multisensory design. To date, 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 cross-sensory tasks. We found significant correspondences 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 for creating sensory interfaces that align with how preschoolers integrate sensory input, and a replicable method for probing cross-sensory cognition in this age group.

Full paper

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3772318.3790709

Citation

Roberts-Morgan, T., Susan Li, M., Y. Lo, P., Fan, Z., Bennett, D., & Metatla, O. (2026). Touching emotions, smelling shapes: exploring tactile, olfactory and emotional cross-sensory correspondences in preschool-aged children. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–14).

BibTeX

@inproceedings{roberts2026touching, title={Touching Emotions, Smelling Shapes: Exploring Tactile, Olfactory and Emotional Cross-sensory Correspondences in Preschool-aged Children}, author={Roberts-Morgan, Tegan and Susan Li, Min and Y. Lo, Priscilla and Fan, Zhuzhi and Bennett, Dan and Metatla, Oussama}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, pages={1--14}, year={2026} }