EX-ITTEN-005 — Warm/cool cross-cultural transfer

Question and falsifier

Are hue–temperature judgments stable across language and climate, and do they predict affect, urgency, or distance? The universal account fails with substantial group-by-hue interactions or dissociation among thermal, affective, urgency, and depth outcomes.

Work completed

A fixed-seed toy power simulation examined a standardized cross-group interaction of .25, with 2,000 runs at 30, 60, 120, and 240 analyzable participants per stratum.

Pilot results

Estimated power was .081, .205, .4915, and .861, respectively. The provisional planning value is therefore 240 analyzable participants per language/climate stratum, not 120. This is only a rough planning simulation; pilot variance and the final mixed-effects structure must replace it.

Field experiment ready to run

• Sampling: at least four language/climate strata selected prospectively; record multilingualism, residence history, climate exposure, color vocabulary, education, and display/device characteristics.
• Stimuli: calibrated hue circle at crossed lightness/chroma/intensity levels; include achromatic controls and natural/material scenes.
• Separate outcomes: thermal rating, expected physical temperature, affect, arousal, urgency, nearness, preference, and free naming. Never collapse them into “warmth.”
• Translation: forward translation, independent back-translation, cognitive interview, and measurement-invariance testing.
• Design: randomized within-person stimulus trials; avoid red/blue response labels and culturally loaded icons.
• Analysis: hierarchical ordinal models; group × hue × intensity interactions; invariance and leave-one-culture-out prediction.

Current position / continuation

Stage: power scaffold complete; zero survey or participant responses collected. Next action: secure cultural research partners, translate instruments, conduct cognitive interviews, then estimate variance from a 20-person-per-stratum pilot. Data: ../experiments/data/ex-itten-005.json.