Kosuke Motoki

Verified

Kosuke verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Kosuke verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at The University of Tokyo

As brands expand globally into linguistically diverse cultures, choosing effective brand names is becoming more important than ever. In brand naming, the in-out effect refers to the phenomenon where the articulation pattern of brand names (i.e., inward vs. outward movement of muscles when pronouncing the brand names) influences preferences. Here, w...

Voice quality, or type of phonation (e.g., a whispery voice) can prime specific sensory associations amongst consumers. In the realm of sensory and consumer science, a wide range of taste-sound correspondences have been documented. A growing body of research on crossmodal correspondences has revealed that people reliably associate sounds with basic...

Thoughts and associations are spontaneously generated and situated. A growing body of research on crossmodal correspondences has revealed that individuals tend to associate information across sensory modalities. However, most of the findings have been based on restricted sensory pairs/items and the role of context remains largely unexplored. Relyin...

In recent years, a new trend has emerged where a growing number of firms have started using brand names without the vowels (e.g., Tumblr, Qzzr). However, to date research has not investigated how consumers evaluate such brand names. The current study aimed to explore the perception of vowel-less brand names among consumers. Across two studies, part...

There has been an ever-increasing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) in the hospitality sector. However, it is still unclear how consumers respond to products/services in hospitality industries provided by AI. Building on the theoretical framework for using AI in different services and the literature on luxury consumption across four studies,...

Many consumers today pursue health goal to behave healthier and there is a growing interest in promoting consumers’ healthy eating habits in gastronomy. Empirical evidence has demonstrated that sensory cues (e.g., food colour, food shapes, background music) influence healthy eating behavior. However, the theoretical understanding of the model incor...

Overconsumption is a leading factor behind the rising incidence of obesity worldwide. As consumers struggle to understand the true caloric and nutritional value of the foods they consume in an increasingly cluttered marketplace, food manufacturers are being tasked with finding more effective ways of communicating nutritional facts. We thus examined...

Reduplication, a linguistic feature in which part or all of a word is repeated (e.g., "kuku," in which the syllable "ku" is doubled), is widely observed across languages and plays a significant role in child-directed speech, language acquisition, and even adult communication (e.g., "knock knock"). Despite its prevalence, reduplication remains one o...

Alternative proteins have attracted increasing attention from researchers and industry. Generally, consumers exhibit reluctance toward accepting alternative proteins. However, the potential of cognitive strategies to enhance consumer acceptance of alternative proteins remains unclear. Drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we investigated...

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...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

Purpose This research examined the role of post-conflict marketing in supporting businesses within conflict-affected regions, aligning with the objectives of UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 to foster peaceful societies amid increasing global conflicts. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from the theories of social egalitarianism and consumer d...

Team diversity must be promoted in many societies. While prior studies have emphasized the consequential impact of diverse teams on businesses, particularly in Western countries known for their racial and gender diversity, there is a notable gap in research exploring the role of team diversity on consumer evaluations among non-WEIRD (Western, Educa...

Online grocery shopping has become increasingly important in daily life. Consumers use the helpfulness of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to reduce uncertainty and risk in online grocery shopping. Emotions such as positive arousal (e.g., energised) and calmness (e.g., relaxed) are often found in the eWOM of food products. However, little is known a...

In recent years, the severity of poor eating habits and health issues related to a poor diet has increased. Brand personality is undoubtedly essential for creating a positive evaluation of healthy foods. Prior research on food stereotypes suggests that people associate healthy foods with femininity. This study investigates the effects of gendered b...

Purpose Front-of-pack (FOP) nutrition labeling has attracted considerable attention in a wide range of communities. However, the limited effects of FOP nutrition labels on healthier food preferences have been reported. Drawing on the dual system theory, this study aimed to investigate which FOP nutrition labels increase healthier food preferences a...

Humanness perception, which attributes fundamental and unique human characteristics to other objects or people, has significant consequences for people’s interactions. Notably, the failure to perceive humanness in older adults can lead to prejudice. This study investigates the effect of a target’s age on humanness perception in terms of two dimensi...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Alternative proteins have recently received significant attention from both academia and industry. Given the reported lower willingness of consumers to accept these alternative protein sources, it is crucial to gain insights into consumers' perceptions of them. Study 1, based on the theory of the meaning of objects and concepts, unveiled the connot...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

Service firms can use sensory cues to provide a perception of luxury in terms of quality and service. In the area of destination branding, brand names are one of the core elements of brands that help communicate their image to a consumer in the hospitality and tourism sector. Psycholinguistics research demonstrates that linguistic cues embedded wit...

The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on crossmodal correspondences. Broadly speaking, this term has been used to encompass associations between and among features, dimensions, or attributes across the senses. There has been an increasing interest in this topic amongst researchers from multiple fields (psychology, neuroscience, mu...

Increasingly, firms are adopting "green packaging" due to regulatory and environmental concerns about packaging waste. The alcoholic-beverage industry has introduced creative paper bottles for their alcoholic drinks. Previous research on sustainable packaging has shown a positive halo effect on the perception of the food contained within. In contra...

There has been a noticeable increase of interest in research on multisensory flavour perception in recent years. Humans are visually dominant creatures and a growing body of research has investigated how visual cues influence taste/flavour perception. At the same time, however, several null or limited findings have also been published recently; tha...

People reliably associate visual aesthetic features such as curvature and symmetry with tastes. In the present study, considering the transitive hypothesis of crossmodal correspondences, we evaluate whether these findings extend to the relationship between sound aesthetic features and tastes, and whether feature-based congruency or affective primin...

The influence of ageism on mind attribution in older adults remains unclear. For this study, the Mind Attribution Scale—a measure of intentional, cognitive, and emotional mental attribution—was translated into Japanese. The Need to Belong Scale was used to confirm construct validity. Therefore, the effect of ageism (measured using the Fraboni Scale...

This study examines the relationship between instrumental timbre and brand personality and its underlying mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that the connotative meanings of instrumental timbre act as a cognitive mechanism behind the timbre-brand association based on gender stereotypes. Specifically, sogos created using feminine instruments that...

Across five studies (including one supplementary study), we demonstrated that the length of brand names influences the expectations of healthiness in foods and preference for healthy foods. Specifically, foods with shorter (versus longer) brand names are perceived as healthier, and consumers prefer such foods. The perceived potency of names and exp...

Despite the wide body of literature available on the sound symbolism of food, the role of timbre in influencing food perception is yet underexplored. Given the shared gender stereotypes between timbre (musical instruments) and foods, this research examined the relationship between masculine/feminine instruments and meat/plant attributes across four...

Viewing sets of food products is common in consumer environments. Previous research on visual perception suggests the phenomena of global judgements (or summary statistical representation), which means that people often extract summary statistical information of multiple objects (e.g., average size, hue) at a glance. Consumers may form summary stat...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health crisis. Although it has been expected that the vaccination of COVID-19 mitigates the crisis, some people are reluctant to receive the COVID-19 vaccination. Based on the theory of mental simulation and affective forecasting, we investigated how mental simulations influence COVID-19 vaccination intentio...

Body-image disturbance is a core feature of eating disorders and can predict their development in healthy individuals. There are two components of body-image disturbance: perceptual disturbance (associated with overestimation of body size) and affective disturbance (associated with body dissatisfaction). Previous behavioral studies have hypothesize...

Animacy perception—discriminating between animate and inanimate visual stimuli—is the basis for engaging in social cognition and for our survival (e.g., avoiding potential danger). Previous studies indicate that factors in a target, such as the features or motion of a target, enhance animacy perception. However, factors in a perceiver, such as the...

This paper focuses on the impact of marketing-related sensory factors on consumers’ healthy food consumption and reviews relevant studies published in top marketing journals after 2000. We found that the association between sensory factors and healthy food consumption has been of interest in a variety of marketing-related fields, including consumer...

The worldwide prevalence of obesity and lifestyle diseases has increased the importance of healthy eating. Understanding consumer preferences for healthy food could lead to healthier food consumption and help mitigate public health concerns. Continued research in food science, marketing, and consumer psychology has demonstrated that healthy food pr...

We test how and why food taste and brand personality interactively influence consumer evaluations. Although food branding is a substantial and large market, studies on food taste and brand personality have only been conducted separately. Across four studies (including one real-brand study), the present study aimed to reveal the association between...

In the wake of the global pandemic, interacting with others while wearing masks has emerged as a global challenge. A growing body of literature has reported that face masks hinder emotion recognition in Western populations. Given that diagnostic facial features for recognizing specific emotions (e.g., happiness) differ between Western and Eastern c...

Phonetic elements of brand names can convey a range of specific meanings. However, an integrated understanding of the sound symbolism of brand names remains elusive. Here, we classify sound symbolism in brand names based on three key dimensions of the semantic differential (evaluation, potency, and activity). In particular, we demonstrated that the...

We attempted to evaluate the replicability and generalizability of ten influential research on sensory marketing by conducting a high-powered and pre-registered replication in online settings in non-WEIRD consumers. The results revealed that only 20% of findings could be successfully replicated, and their effect sizes are as half as the original on...

Body-image disturbance is a core feature of eating disorders and can predict their development in healthy individuals. There are two components of body-image disturbance: perceptual disturbance (associated with overestimation of body size) and affective disturbance (associated with body dissatisfaction). Previous behavioral studies have hypothesize...

Dietary supplements are prevalent and represent a huge (and still growing) global market. Such products are intended to enhance health and wellness as well as to supplement diets. Compared to the large amount of dietary supplements research on nutrition, dietetics, and medicine, far less research has been conducted in the realm of sensory and consu...

In recent years, a growing number of academic researchers, as well as many marketing and design practitioners, have uncovered a variety of factors that would appear to enhance the visual attractiveness, or deliciousness, of food images to the typical consumer. This review, which contains both narrative and systematic elements, critically evaluates...

Eating and drinking are undoubtedly amongst life’s most multisensory experiences. Take, for instance, the enjoyment of flavor, which is one of the most important elements of such experiences, resulting from the integration of gustatory, (retronasal) olfactory, and possibly also trigeminal/oral-somatosensory cues. Nevertheless, researchers have sugg...

Animacy perception—discriminating between animate and inanimate visual stimuli—is the basis for engaging in social cognition and for our survival (e.g. avoiding potential danger). Previous studies indicate that bottom-up factors, such as the features or motion of a target, enhance animacy perception. However, top-down factors such as elements in pe...

In the wake of the global pandemic, interacting with others while wearing masks has emerged as a global challenge. A growing body of literature has reported that face masks hinder emotion recognition in Western populations. Given that diagnostic facial features for recognizing specific emotions (e.g., happiness) differ between Western and Eastern c...

Eating and drinking are undoubtedly amongst life’s most multisensory experiences. Take, for instance, the enjoyment of flavor, which is one of the most important elements of such experiences, resulting from the integration of gustatory, (retronasal) olfactory, and possibly also trigeminal/oral-somatosensory cues (Prescott, 2015). Nevertheless, rese...

There is a growing interest in insects as a promising alternative source of protein that can potentially contribute to help solving the imminent global food crisis. However, research on insect-based foods (IBFs) has repeatedly pointed to the fact that, in many countries and cultures, negative attitudes towards eating insects are one of the most sig...

Sensory evaluation can be influenced by semantic information such as gender descriptions. Gender categories are associated with tactile information (e.g., female = soft/smooth, while male = hard/rough). Feminine scents (e.g., floral) are typically perceived as soft and smooth. Thus, semantic labels of gender (feminine/masculine qualities) may influ...

Research suggests that speech sounds within a brand name can influence taste expectations of a product (e.g., voiceless consonants are often linked to sour tastes). Though carbonated beverages are sold across all markets in the world, to date, linkages between the brand names and their carbonation expectation yet remains unexplored. This research i...

A large body of literature now shows the association of various linguistic attributes (e.g., vowel length, voiced consonants) with tastes (e.g., sweet, bitter). Despite the knowledge gathered so far in this field, no overarching explanation has been provided. Here we reveal that taste-speech sound associations depend on the age of acquisition of sp...

Store atmospheres are inherently multisensory and constitute an important driver of consumer behaviour. The research suggests that background music (as one element of the multisensory atmosphere) can influence consumer preference and choice. However, the findings have been inconsistent as far as how background music influences people’s preferences...

Engineering healthy diets from sustainable food resources undoubtedly constitutes a major global challenge. One solution to the problem of developing healthy and sustainable diets involves the incorporation of various novel/unfamiliar foods into our diets (e.g., insect-based foods, cultured meats, plant-based meat alternatives, and 3D printed foods...

During the first sequence of lockdowns implemented in many countries around the world in early 2020 as a result of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, there was widespread concern amongst many health professionals regarding a predicted rise in alcohol consumption. However, studies have reported diverse findings, with some consumer groups exhibiting an...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, is a global public health crisis. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, it is necessary to promote vaccine administration and preventive behaviors (e.g., mask, handwashing, social distancing). However, some people have negative attitudes toward vaccine administration and preventive behaviors. B...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, is a global public health crisis. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, it is necessary to promote vaccine administration and preventive behaviors (e.g., mask, handwashing, social distancing). However, some people have negative attitudes toward vaccine administration and preventive behaviors. B...

Odors are often difficult to describe verbally, and little is known about the association of odors with the words that describe them. Following the literature on crossmodal correspondences between odors and sounds/haptics, this study aimed to reveal how odors are associated with the words describing textures and haptics in the Japanese language. Fi...

Editorial of special issue "multisensory consumer-computer interaction" in the Journal of Business Research.

Coffee is one of the world’s most frequently consumed beverages, and coffee culture is an increasingly popular phenomenon across the world. Atmospheric elements are especially important for the design of coffee shops. However, it is still unclear how the visual atmospherics (e.g., colour scheme, lightness) of coffee shop interiors influence the con...

Emotions and temperature are closely related through embodied processes, and people seem to associate temperature concepts with emotions. While this relationship is often evidenced by everyday language (e.g., cold and warm feelings), what remains missing to date is a systematic study that holistically analyzes how and why people associate specific...

Shadowing and reading aloud both involve multiple complex cognitive processes, and both are considered effective methods for second-language learning. The working memory system, particularly the phonological loop, has been suggested to be involved in shadowing and reading aloud. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a 4-week i...

Given the worldwide growth of the over-the-counter (OTC) drug market and the increase in the direct-to-consumer advertising of medicines, pharmaceutical branding has become an increasingly important component affecting the consumer’s beliefs about, and hence their responses towards, OTC medicines. The brand name is one of the most important externa...

Visual processing is a core cognitive element of sensory and consumer science. Consumers visually attend to food types, packaging, label design, advertisements, supermarket shelves, food menus, and other visible information. During the past decade, sensory and consumer science have used eye tracking to elucidate visual processing by consumers. This...

Career choices affect not only our financial status but also our future well-being. When making these choices, individuals evaluate their willingness to obtain a job (i.e., job values), primarily driven by simulation of future pay and interest. Despite the importance of these decisions, their underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. In this stu...

Many food decisions are made rapidly and without reflective processing. The ability to determine nutritional information accurately is a precursor of food decisions and is important for a healthy diet and weight management. However, little is known about the cognitive evaluation of food attributes based on visual information in relation to assessin...

A number of studies have now examined the in/out effect, whereby “inwards” spoken words imitating an inwards articulatory motion (akin to the swallowing motion) are typically rated higher on dimensions of edibility, palatability, likeability, approach and willingness to pay. The reverse is true of so-called “outwards” words mimicking oral expulsive...

Science is facing a reproducibility crisis, and there is a concern about the reproducibility of the research findings, especially in psychology. The research findings in leading journals of consumer research have been found to be unreproducible. Questionable research practices (QRPs) such as p-hacking and HARKing may be involved in this reproducibi...

The interest in healthy food has grown rapidly amongst both consumers and food manufacturers in recent years. However, which foods should be considered healthy is sometimes ambiguous. Identifying those factors that influence the perception of healthfulness is of interest both to consumers and to food manufacturers. Previous research has shown that...

Here, we present the outcome of the 4 th workshop on Multisensory Approaches to Human-Food Interaction (MHFI), developed in collaboration with ICMI 2020 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Capitalizing on the increasing interest on multisensory aspects of human-food interaction and the unique contribution that our community offers, we developed a space to...

Here, we present the outcome of the 4th workshop on Multisensory Approaches to Human-Food Interaction (MHFI), developed in collaboration with ICMI 2020 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Capitalizing on the increasing interest on multisensory aspects of human-food interaction and the unique contribution that our community offers, we developed a space to...

The potential use of insects as a novel food resource has recently attracted a great deal of attention because of their environmental and nutritional benefits. Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the use of insects as food, residents of economically developed countries tend not to accept insect-based foods. This study reviewed earlier reports...

Temperature is an important characteristic of food and drink. In addition to food-intrinsic temperature (i.e., serving temperature), consumers often experience food-extrinsic temperature (e.g., physical warmth). Emerging research on cross-modal correspondence has revealed that people reliably associate temperature with other sensory features. Build...

A significant body of research demonstrates the existence of taste-shape correspondences. People associate tastes and visual shapes non-randomly. For example, round shapes are associated with sweet taste, while angular shapes are associated with sour and bitter tastes. Previous studies focused on one-to-one taste-shape associations, where either ge...

Subjective values for food rewards guide our dietary choices. There is growing evidence that value signals are constructed in the brain by integrating multiple types of information about flavour, taste, and nutritional attributes of the foods. However, much less is known about the influence of food-extrinsic factors such as labels, brands, prices,...

Eating disorder tendencies are psychological characteristics that are prevalent in healthy young females and are known to be among the risk factors for eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. People with greater eating disorder tendencies strongly associate sweet and fatty foods with weight gain and strictly avoid consuming such food...

Consumers often share product-related content (e.g., advertising), and highly shared advertising has a huge impact on consumer behavior. Despite its apparent effectiveness, prediction of whether such advertising will be highly shared is a poorly understood area of marketing. Advances in brain imaging techniques may allow researchers to forecast agg...

Working memory (WM) training (WMT), aerobic exercise training (AET), and dual-task training improve cognitive functions and alter neural systems in older adults. In particular, the effects have been investigated of dual-task training that combines a walking or standing activity (balance exercise) simultaneously performed with cognitive training (wh...

Research on those variables that have been shown to influence the consumer’s choice of beer is reviewed. The focus is on the choice of whether to drink beer as opposed to a beverage from another category, and to a greater extent, the choice between different types of beer. Inspired by previous research on a diverse array of factors that have been s...

Insect-based foods have gained much attention as an alternative source of protein in recent years because of their high nutritional content and low production costs. However, consumer acceptance of insect-based foods still poses a big challenge in many societies. Across three studies, we examined how social companions (alone, friend, family, acquai...

Subjective value for food rewards guide our dietary choices. There is growing evidence that value signals are constructed in the brain by integrating multiple types of information about flavour, taste, and nutritional attributes of the foods. However, much less is known about the influence of food-extrinsic factors such as labels, brands, prices, a...

Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of loneliness on...

Hedonic goods are goods that people buy to obtain emotional experiences, such as joy or excitement, while utilitarian goods are bought to meet functional or instrumental needs. Although research in neuroscience suggests that the values of hedonic and utilitarian goods are similarly represented, it remains largely unknown how these values are mapped...

Product names can be developed to effectively convey specific sensory attributes to the consumer. Most of previous research on crossmodal correspondences has shown that people selectively associate words (e.g., ‘Maluma’, ‘Takete’) with taste attributes. To provide practical insights for naming new products in the food industry, it is important to o...

Emotion plays important and diverse roles across various social relations. Although the social functions of emotion have attracted increased attention, the effects of positive emotions such as pride on impression formation remain poorly understood. Drawing on social projection theory, this study examined how incidental experiences of pride influenc...

The authors regret there was a typographical error made in Fig. 1. The Fig 1 has been updated. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We have seen a rapid growth of interest in crossmodal correspondences between sound and taste over recent years. People consistently associate higher-pitched sounds with sweet/sour foods, while lower-pitched sounds tend to be associated with bitter foods. The human voice is key in broadcast advertising, and the role of voice in communication genera...

In retail settings, social perception of other peoples’ preferences is fundamental to successful interpersonal interactions (e.g., product recommendations, gift-giving). This type of perception must be made with little information, very often based solely on facial cues. Although people are capable of accurately predicting others’ preferences from...

Two types of affect influence consumers’ attention: incidental affect unrelated to a particular perception or judgment and integral affect directly related to the particular options under consideration. Although integral and incidental affect likely coexist on a regular basis, the claim that both concurrently guide consumers’ attention has thus far...

Crossmodal correspondences have been increasingly reported in recent scholarship, and pitch–taste associations have been observed. People consistently associate high-pitched vocal tones with sweet/sour foods, while low-pitched tones tend to be associated with bitter foods. The human voice is key in broadcast advertising, and the role of voice in co...

Background: Body image disturbance (BID) is a core psychopathology of eating disorders. The concept of two components in BID is widely accepted. One is a disturbance of perception: perceptual body-size distortion (PD) that is calculated as a discrepancy between one’s real-body and one’s estimated self-body. The other is a disturbance in cognitive-a...