What noise does gunge make?
I worked with Mary Spiller and our research intern Jennah Asad to find out what associations people make with different mixtures of hydroxyethyl cellulose.
What’s hydroxyethyl cellulose? Why, it’s gunge - or slime, if you’re not a British English speaker. Yes, that’s right, the stuff that features heavily in kids’ TV shows.
We got our participants to run their hands through gunge mixtures of different thicknesses and asked them which gunge they thought matched best with a variety of different sounds and sights, including dark and light colours and high and low-pitched noises.
This study is useful because it tells us about crossmodal correspondences, a sort of framework that allows our brains to make predictions about the world. If you know one bit of sensory information about an object - say that it’s small - you start to make unconscious predictions about what your other senses might tell you about it - that it’s a light weight, or it makes a high-pitched noise. These predictions make it easier for our brains to glue together all the information coming in from different senses, something that’s really important in order to give us a useful idea of what the world is like and how we can interact with it.
We picked gunge for this project because there was a lot of information about how solids fit into the framework, but almost no information about liquids. And now we know: people think thicker liquids go with darker, duller colours and thinner liquids go with higher pitches.