Red-hot: How colour and semantic temperature processing interact in a Stroop-like paradigm

Temperature concepts and colour are commonly associated (i.e., red is “hot” and blue is “cold”), although their direction of influence (unidirectional, bidirectional) is unknown. Semantic Stroop effects, whereby words like fire influence colour categorization, suggest automatic semantic processing influences colour processing. The experiential framework of language comprehension indicates abstract concepts like temperature words simulate concrete experiences in their representation, where expressions like “red-hot” suggest colour processing influences conceptual processing. Participants categorized both colour (Experiment 1: red, blue; Experiment 2: red, green, blue) and word-meaning with matched lists of hot and cold meaning words in each colour. In Experiments 1 and 2, semantic categorization showed congruency effects across hot and cold words, while colour categorization showed facilitation only with hot words in Experiment 2. This asymmetry reflects a more consistent influence of colour categorization on semantic categorization than the reverse, suggesting experiential grounding effects may be more robust than the effects of semantic processing on colour processing.