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A Sweet Sound? Food Names Reveal Implicit Associations between Taste and Pitch
Abstract
Sounds (high- and low-pitched) have been shown to be implicitly associated with basic tastes (sour and bitter-see Crisinel and Spence, 2009 Neuroscience Letters 464 39-42). In the present study, a version of the implicit association test was used to assess the strength of the association between high-pitched sounds and names of sweet-tasting foodstuffs, and between low-pitched sounds and names of salty-tasting foodstuffs (experiment 1). A similar task, the go/no-go association task was then used to evaluate the relative strengths of these associations (experiment 2). Analysis of the sensitivity of participants' responses suggested that both sour- and sweet-tasting (names of) food items were associated with high-pitched sounds. This result highlights the existence of robust cross-modal associations between certain sounds and basic tastes.
... Furthermore, previous research has shown the particular attributes of the sound associated with basic taste. For example, sweet and sour flavours are related to the high pitch, whereas bitterness is correlated to the low pitch (24)(25)(26)(27). ...
... In the earlier study, sweetness and sourness correspond with higher pitch sounds, whereas bitterness corresponds with lower-pitched sounds (24,25). In this experiment, orange juice was tasted in silence (control condition) and in two different sound stimuli presented alternatively in a balanced order. ...
... SD=1.25) (see figure 3). This result supports the earlier literature that sweet flavours are related to the high pitch (24,25) and red lighting colour enhances the perception of sweetness (32,38). ...
Recently, many researchers argued that modifying food and drink colours and packaging design affects consumers' taste and flavour perception. When it comes to the fruit juice, the specific colour of the package can affect the taste perception, whether it is sweet, sour, or bitter can influence the consumer's choice. However, flavour relies on integrating stimuli from all the human senses, and the surrounding environment can modify this experience. For example, the background sound playing has been found to affect the perception of sweetness, sourness, and bitterness; the ambient room lighting colour may affect the subjective value of the beverage. Combining these findings can have a significant role in individuals' healthy food and drink habits, leading them to have better lifestyles. This study aims to understand the context of the multisensory design environment on healthy beverages' flavour perception, particularly in fruit juice. A multisensory experiment that focuses on individuals' flavour perception has been conducted by combining audio and visual atmospheres created in indoor environments. The development of multisensory design strategies in this research can contribute to future design innovation in food architecture, such as cafeterias, school canteens, and restaurants.
... demonstrates the crossmodal association between basic tastes and the relative pitch of sounds (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010aVelasco et al., 2014;Wang et al., 2016), tempo (Mesz et al., 2012, certain musical parameters (e.g., roughness, sharpness) (Knoeferle et al., 2015), speech sounds (Motoki et al., , 2021Ngo et al., 2011;Pathak et al., , 2022Simner et al., 2010), timbre (Crisinel & Spence, 2010b;Qi et al., 2020) and musical stimuli (Kontukoski et al., 2015;Mesz et al., 2011;Motoki et al., 2022;Peng-Li et al., 2020;Reinoso Carvalho et al., 2017;Wang et al., 2015;Wang & Spence, 2016). ...
... The results contribute to our understanding of the acoustic properties behind wellknown sound-taste correspondences. Previous research on crossmodal correspondences has demonstrated that various sounds can be associated with different tastes (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010aKnoeferle et al., 2015;Knöferle & Spence, 2012;Motoki et al., 2019. For example, higher-pitched sounds are matched with sweet and sour tastes, while lower-pitched sounds are associated with bitter tastes (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010aKnoeferle et al., 2015;Motoki et al., 2019. ...
... Previous research on crossmodal correspondences has demonstrated that various sounds can be associated with different tastes (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010aKnoeferle et al., 2015;Knöferle & Spence, 2012;Motoki et al., 2019. For example, higher-pitched sounds are matched with sweet and sour tastes, while lower-pitched sounds are associated with bitter tastes (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010aKnoeferle et al., 2015;Motoki et al., 2019. Consistent with the previous findings (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, our results demonstrate that higherpitched vocals (i.e., falsetto voices) are matched more strongly with sweet and sour tastes than relatively lower-pitched vocals (e.g., creaky voices). ...
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 taste qualities. Here, we examined the largely unexplored associations between basic tastes and sounds: namely taste-voice quality correspondences. Across three pre-registered studies, participants associated four types of voice qualities (modal, whispery, creaky, and falsetto) with the five basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami). Study 1 investigated the relations between voice qualities and taste words. Study 2 attempted to replicate the findings and revealed the underpinning psychological mechanisms in terms of semantic/emotional associations. Study 3 used the descriptions of food products that varied in terms of their taste in order to expand the applicability of the findings. The results demonstrated that participants reliably associate specific voice qualities with particular tastes. Falsetto voices are matched more strongly with sweetness than other voices. Creaky voices are matched more strongly with bitterness than with other voice qualities. Modal voices are matched more strongly with umami than creaky voices. Evaluation/positive valence might partially underlie the associations between sweet/bitter-voice quality correspondences. Taken together, these findings reveal a novel case of sound-taste correspondences and deepen our understanding of how people are able to associate attributes from different senses.
... The purpose of Experiment 2 was to expand the findings of Experiment 1 and evaluate whether people also exhibit associations between emotions and temperature concepts at an implicit level. To this end, we conducted a modified Implicit Associated Test (IAT) similar to the one employed by Crisinel and Spence [83] and Chen et al. [84], including the improved IAT scoring algorithm suggested by Greenwald et al. [85]. Given that the emotions evaluated in Experiment 1 were derived from different combinations in the valence-arousal space and these dimensions were related to the temperatures, in Experiment 2, we used the positive and negative poles of both dimensions according to the emotion circumplex proposed by Jaeger et al. [70] as stimuli in two separate versions of the IAT. ...
... The IAT was programmed and conducted in Gorilla, and participants completed the experiment online using their desktop or laptop computers. The experiment followed a similar design to the one used in Crisinel and Spence [83]. The experiment comprised seven blocks (see Table 3) in which participants were asked to match the stimulus according to a specific mapping by pressing one of two keys (i.e., left key "F" and right key "J"). ...
... A value of 0 means total overlap between the distributions, while values of -1 and 1 mean no overlap [90]. Next, D values using RTs were analyzed following the improved scoring algorithm proposed by Greenwald et al. [85] (see also [83]). More specifically, the response times of the error trials were replaced by the mean response time of the block plus two standard deviations. ...
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 temperatures with emotions. The present research aimed to investigate the associations between temperature concepts and emotion adjectives on both explicit and implicit levels. In Experiment 1, we evaluated explicit associations between twelve pairs of emotion adjectives derived from the circumplex model of affect, and five different temperature concepts ranging from 0˚C to 40˚C, based on responses from 403 native speakers of four different languages
(English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that, across languages, the temperatures were associated with different regions of the circumplex model. The 0˚C and 10˚C were associated with negative-valanced, low-arousal emotions, while 20˚C was associated with positive-valanced, low-to-medium-arousal emotions. Moreover, 30˚C was associated with positive-valanced, high-arousal emotions; and 40˚C was associated with high-arousal and either positive- or negative-valanced emotions. In Experiment 2 (N = 102), we explored whether these temperature-emotion associations were also present at the implicit level, by conducting Implicit Association Tests (IATs) with temperature words (cold and hot) and opposing pairs of emotional adjectives for each dimension of valence (Unhappy/Dissatisfied vs. Happy/Satisfied) and arousal (Passive/Quiet vs. Active/Alert) on native English speakers. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that participants held implicit associations between the word hot and positive-valanced and high-arousal emotions. Additionally, the word cold was associated with negative-valanced and low arousal emotions. These findings provide evidence for the existence of temperature-emotion associations at both explicit and implicit levels across languages.
... Studies have found that people tend to associate sounds with tastes (Kn€ oferle Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010). For instance, Crisinel and Spence (2009, 2010a, 2010b conducted a series of studies to demonstrate associations between higher pitched musical notes (from piano or stringed, woodwind, or brass instruments) and a sweet or sour taste along with associations between lower pitched sounds and a salty or bitter taste. These music-taste associations could modulate the influence of music on people's perception of foods or drinks (Carvalho et al., 2015;Carvalho, Wang, Van Ee, Persoone, & Spence, 2017;Kn€ oferle, Woods, Kappler, & Spence, 2015;Q. ...
... Moreover, we also observed some pitch-taste associations, as lower pitch was more preferentially matched to a bitter or salty taste than sourness, sweetness, or umami. These results were consistent with Crisinel and Spence's (2009, 2010a, 2010b findings with musical notes produced by piano, strings, woodwind, or brass. Even though we used a narrower pitch range (starting with D4) compared with previous studies, we were able to identify significant pitch-color and pitch-taste associations, suggesting the robustness of these crossmodal correspondences (also see P. Walker, 2016). ...
... The results of Experiment 1 revealed some color-pitch and taste-pitch associations for musical notes produced by bowed strings, plucked strings, winds, and percussion instruments from a Chinese orchestra. These results, observed with Chinese participants, were consistent with previous studies conducted with Western participants and musical notes produced by Western instruments (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010b. These findings therefore suggest that crossmodal mapping between pitch and color or taste is universal across varied musical styles or different populations. ...
People tend to associate stimuli from different sensory modalities, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. We conducted two experiments to investigate how Chinese participants associated musical notes produced by four types of Chinese instruments (bowed strings, plucked strings, winds, and percussion instruments) with different colors, taste terms, and fabric textures. Specifically, the participants were asked to select a sound to match each color patch or taste term in Experiment 1 and to match the experience of touching each fabric in Experiment 2. The results demonstrated some associations between pitch and color, taste term, or the smoothness of fabrics. Moreover, certain types of Chinese instruments were preferentially chosen to match some of the colors, taste terms, and the texture of certain fabrics. These findings therefore provided insights about the perception of Chinese music and shed light on how to apply the multisensory features of sounds to enhance the composition, performance, and appreciation of music.
... Moreover, our participants also reported lower median reaction times for the classification of food tastes during the listening of salty soundtracks than during the listening of sweet and neutral soundtracks. This surprising result could be explained by the fact that research on the acoustic and musical parameters matching different tastes and flavors has primarily revealed the difference between bitterness and sweetness (e.g., Crisinel et al., 2012) or the association between high pitch and sour and sweet tastes (Crisinel and Spence, 2009;Crisinel and Spence, 2010b). Saltiness, for example, has been matched to pitch and roughness levels ranging in between sweetness and bitterness matching levels (Knöferle and Spence, 2012;Terhardt, 1974), so that the distance from sweet sound features is smaller than the distance between sweet and bitter sound features. ...
... Saltiness, for example, has been matched to pitch and roughness levels ranging in between sweetness and bitterness matching levels (Knöferle and Spence, 2012;Terhardt, 1974), so that the distance from sweet sound features is smaller than the distance between sweet and bitter sound features. Furthermore, at least one study did not find a clear association between salty tastes and low-pitched sounds (Crisinel and Spence, 2010b); thus, it could be possible that some acoustic parameters of the sweet and salty soundtracks used in this study are not so dissimilar as in the case of sweet and bitter soundtracks, leading to our outcome. Effectively, even if sweet and salty tastes are classified faster during the listening of the corresponding soundtracks with respect to neutral and silent conditions (congruency effect), an incongruence effect (i.e., sweet taste classified more slowly during the listening of the salty soundtrack than during the listening of the sweet soundtrack, and salty taste classified more slowly during the listening of the sweet soundtrack than during the listening of the salty soundtrack) was found only for the salty taste. ...
... Therefore, it might be stated that the ease of the classification task has hidden possible soundtrack effects on accuracy rates. More rapid responses to the names of sweet than of salty food items were observed in a study by Crisinel and Spence (2010b), who explained them as a consequence of the selection of better exemplars for sweet items than for salty items, because the latter items were possibly bad instances for some participants if, for them, salty was synonymous with over-salted. From this point of view, we could refer also to the polarity coding principle proposed by Proctor and Cho (2006), which has been considered a determinant of mapping effects in orthogonal stimulusresponse compatibility, numerical judgment, and implicit association tasks. ...
A growing body of empirical research documents the existence of several interesting crossmodal correspondences between auditory and gustatory/flavor stimuli, demonstrating that people can match specific acoustic and musical parameters with different tastes and flavors. In this context, a number of researchers and musicians arranged their own soundtracks so as to match specific tastes and used them for research purposes, revealing explicit crossmodal effects on judgments of taste comparative intensity or of taste/sound accordance. However, only few studies have examined implicit associations related to taste–sound correspondences. Thus, the present study was conducted in order to assess possible implicit effects associated to the crossmodal congruency/incongruency between auditory cues and food images during the classification of food tastes. To test our hypothesis, we used ‘salty’ and ‘sweet’ soundtracks with salty and sweet food images, and asked 88 participants to classify the taste of each food image while listening to the soundtracks. We found that sweet food images were classified faster than salty food images, regardless of which soundtrack was presented. Moreover, we found a congruency effect, demonstrating that such soundtracks are effective in eliciting facilitating effects of taste quality classification with congruent food images.
... Design and procedure. The experiment followed a similar design to the one used in Crisinel and Spence (2010). The IAT was programmed and conducted in Gorilla, and the HCA was performed on the visual texture categories temperature ratings. ...
... In addition, we computed D scores for each IAT, which is a widely used method in the analysis of IATs (Chen et al.,2016(Chen et al., , 2015Crisinel & Spence, 2010;Parise & Spence, 2012). The D scores consisted of the mean of the difference in RTs between the initial congruent and incongruent blocks and between the last congruent and incongruent blocks, each divided by their pooled standard deviation. ...
Visual textures are critical in how individuals form sensory expectations about objects, which include somatosensory properties such as temperature. This study aimed to uncover crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature concepts. In Experiment 1 (N = 193), we evaluated crossmodal associations between 43 visual texture categories and different temperature concepts (via temperature words such as cold and hot) using an explicit forced-choice test. The results revealed associations between striped, cracked, matted, and waffled visual textures and high temperatures and between crystalline and flecked visual textures and low temperatures. In Experiment 2 (N = 247), we conducted six Implicit Association Tests (IATs) pairing the two visual textures most strongly associated with low (crystalline and flecked) and high (striped and cracked) temperatures with the words cold and hot as per the results of Experiment 1. When pairing the crystalline and striped visual textures, the results revealed that crystalline was matched to the word cold, and striped was matched to the word hot. However, some associations found through the explicit test were not found in the IATs. In Experiment 3 (N = 124), we investigated how mappings between visual textures and concrete entities may influence crossmodal associations with temperature and these visual textures. Altogether, we found both a range of associations’ strengths and automaticity levels. Importantly, we found evidence of relative effects. Furthermore, some of these crossmodal associations are partly influenced by indirect mappings to concrete entities.
... Since the 1960s, the interaction between auditory and taste perception has attracted academic attention (Holt-Hansen, 1968). This has driven a diverse field of related research (e.g., Beeli et al., 2005;Hänggi et al., 2008;Crisinal and Spence, 2009;2010a;2010b;Simner et al., 2010;Mesz et al., 2011). ...
... Adjectives, such as sweet, dry, light, soft, crisp are used to describe the qualities of both food and music. People make cross-modal associations between the tastes and sounds (e.g., Crisinel and Spence, 2009;2010a;2010b;Simner et al., 2010;Mesz et al., 2011;Bronner, 2012). For example, in the study of Crisinel and Spence (2010a), participants associated sweet and sour taste solutions' tastes to high-pitched sounds, bitter taste to the lowpitched sounds, and salty tastes to medium-pitched sounds. ...
... Research in this field has used similar other modifications of the popular IAT (e.g., Single Target IAT or ST-IAT [64]) to address slightly different empirical questions. The IAT has also been used in the past with auditory (rather than visual) stimuli to test cross-modal associations in the sensory domain (e.g., [65,66]). ...
... The results were analyzed in two ways, (1) following the approach of scoring suggested by Greenwald et al. [67], and (2), comparing the response latencies and error rates in compatible vs. incompatible blocks (as in [66]). D scores are computed as the mean difference between compatible and incompatible blocks, divided by the pooled standard deviation. ...
Throughout the history of languages, poets and writers have used linguistic tools to enhance euphony in their creations. One of the widely used tools to convey melody in any written (or spoken) creative art form is the use of long vowels. This paper examines the linkages between long (vs. short) vowel sounds and taste expectations of sweetness. Across four studies, we demonstrate that people expect products with brand names containing long vowels to taste sweeter than those including short vowel sounds. In studies 1 and 2, we demonstrate this association with the use of self-reported measures, and in studies 3 and 4, we employ indirect measures (implicit taste–shape correspondence and Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) paradigm) to show the effect holds at a subconscious level of processing. Previous research in this field has typically linked vowel position (high vs. low or front vs. back) with product or brand attribute expectations. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature in this field by demonstrating the importance of vowel length in sound symbolism, and more precisely, how it pertains to the taste continuum.
... "Sonic seasoning", the idea that certain auditory stimuli can be deliberately used to alter people's taste perception, is becoming an increasingly popular topic in both the academic literature as well as the popular press [9,73,[76][77][78]. Previously, it has been shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions [79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87] (see Reference [88] for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch, whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch [80,[84][85][86]. ...
... Previously, it has been shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions [79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87] (see Reference [88] for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch, whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch [80,[84][85][86]. Crisinel et al. [7] first demonstrated that beyond any cross-modal associations between sounds and taste words, auditory stimuli could also affect people's taste evaluations. ...
When it comes to eating and drinking, multiple factors from diverse sensory modalities have been shown to influence multisensory flavour perception and liking. These factors have heretofore been strictly divided into either those that are intrinsic to the food itself (e.g., food colour, aroma, texture), or those that are extrinsic to it (e.g., related to the packaging, receptacle or external environment). Given the obvious public health need for sugar reduction, the present review aims to compare the relative influences of product-intrinsic and product-extrinsic factors on the perception of sweetness. Evidence of intrinsic and extrinsic sensory influences on sweetness are reviewed. Thereafter, we take a cognitive neuroscience perspective and evaluate how differences may occur in the way that food-intrinsic and extrinsic information become integrated with sweetness perception. Based on recent neuroscientific evidence, we propose a new framework of multisensory flavour integration focusing not on the food-intrinsic/extrinsic divide, but rather on whether the sensory information is perceived to originate from within or outside the body. This framework leads to a discussion on the combinability of intrinsic and extrinsic influences, where we refer to some existing examples and address potential theoretical limitations. To conclude, we provide recommendations to those in the food industry and propose directions for future research relating to the need for long-term studies and understanding of individual differences.
... "Sonic seasoning", the idea that certain soundtracks can be used to alter people's taste perception, is becoming an increasingly popular topic in both the academic literature and the popular press (Reinoso-Carvalho et al., 2015;Spence, 2015;see Spence, Reinoso-Carvalho, Velasco, & Wang, in press, for a review). Previous research has shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010bMesz, Trevisan, & Sigman, 2011;Mesz, Sigman, & Trevisan, 2012;Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010;; see Knöferle & Spence, 2012, for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010bKnoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;Mesz et al., 2011;. ...
... Previous research has shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010bMesz, Trevisan, & Sigman, 2011;Mesz, Sigman, & Trevisan, 2012;Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010;; see Knöferle & Spence, 2012, for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010bKnoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;Mesz et al., 2011;. Crisinel et al. (2012) first demonstrated that beyond any crossmodal associations between sounds and taste words, auditory stimuli could also affect people's taste evaluations. ...
The present study was designed to investigate the effect of the colour of the cup on sensory and hedonic judgments of specialty coffee by consumers. Altogether, 457 participants took part in one of three experiments. Crossmodal correspondences between the colour of the cup (i.e., an extrinsic cue) and the taste profile of the coffee served (i.e., the contents) were manipulated. Congruent and incongruent colour × taste pairings were created by using four cup colours (white, pink, yellow, and green) and two coffee profiles (sweet Brazilian and acidic Kenyan) to assess whether these manipulations would affect pre-and/or post-tasting ratings. Participants first rated their expectations of sweetness and acidity, and subsequently, their experience of those attributes on tasting the coffees, as well as rating their liking. The results revealed that the colour of the cup exerted a significant influence on both pre- and post-tasting ratings for all attributes measured. Liking ratings significantly decreased in incongruent pairing conditions – which also increased the unexpected acidity of the Kenyan coffee when tasted from the pink cup. Taken together, these results demonstrate for the first time that the colour of the cup significantly impacts sensory and hedonic judgements of specialty coffee. Our results also show that the contrast between expected and actual experience can result in a negative hedonic response and the enhancement of the unexpected sensory attribute. Implications for the development of coffee cups that can enhance the drinking experience are highlighted.
... "Sonic seasoning", the idea that certain soundtracks can be used to alter people's taste perception, is becoming an increasingly popular topic in both the academic literature and the popular press (Reinoso-Carvalho et al., 2015;Spence, 2015;see Spence, Reinoso-Carvalho, Velasco, & Wang, in press, for a review). Previous research has shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010bMesz, Trevisan, & Sigman, 2011;Mesz, Sigman, & Trevisan, 2012;Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010;; see Knöferle & Spence, 2012, for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010bKnoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;Mesz et al., 2011;. ...
... Previous research has shown that specific auditory attributes are associated with basic tastes, both when presented as taste words (for instance, "sweet"), and in the form of tasting solutions (Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010bMesz, Trevisan, & Sigman, 2011;Mesz, Sigman, & Trevisan, 2012;Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010;; see Knöferle & Spence, 2012, for a review). For instance, both sweet and sour tastes are mapped to high pitch whereas bitterness is mapped to low pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010bKnoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;Mesz et al., 2011;. Crisinel et al. (2012) first demonstrated that beyond any crossmodal associations between sounds and taste words, auditory stimuli could also affect people's taste evaluations. ...
It is well‐known that multiple sensory cues influence flavor perception and liking. The present study aimed to combine and compare the relative influences of product‐related and contextual factors on taste perception and liking, with a focus on the perception of sweetness. Participants tasted samples of the same base fruit beverage with one of three different levels of added aroma, while the contextual cues (either visual or auditory) were displayed simultaneously using iPads. The results revealed that both added aroma and background music significantly influenced participants' sweetness ratings, with a medium level of added aroma enhancing sweetness significantly as compared to no added aroma, and with the sweet‐congruent soundtrack enhancing perceived sweetness significantly as compared to the bitter‐congruent soundtrack. Moreover, there was a potentially additive effect from the combination of aroma and soundtrack. These results are discussed in terms of potential mechanisms underlying multisensory flavor perception.
Practical applications
Consumers are nearly always exposed to a multisensory environment whenever they consume food and drink. It is therefore important to acknowledge that, beyond the food itself, what people happen to be exposed to in the environment while eating or drinking can influence their multisensory flavor experiences as well. These results are of relevance for those working on understanding a theoretical model of human sweetness perception, as well as those working on the design of healthier, sugar‐reduced food products. Indeed, the knowledge that multiple sensory cues can, at least under the appropriate conditions, work in conjunction to deliver a greater modulation of perceived taste will allow designers to come up with more effective sugar‐reduced products without reducing consumer satisfaction. Moreover, the increasing prevalence of sensory and augmented reality applications means that manufacturers can now incorporate external visual and auditory content as part of the total multisensory product experience.
... Semantic congruency is one of the factors that underlies the integration effect and refers to situations where the identity and/or meaning of pairs of stimuli match Smell high-fruity [31,182] piano-fruity [31] n/a angular-lemon [69] paired [110] warmcinnamon [69] soft-lemon [37] Taste low-bitter, high-sour, staccato-salty [66,120] trombone-bitter, piano-sweet [10,[28][29][30] lowsweet high-sour [14] symmetrysweet, pleasant [202] angularbitterness [40] pink-sweet, white-salty green-sour, black-bitter [188] n/a roughsour [184] Touch variation-direction [38], high-cold water [212] n/a n/a n/a light color-soft smooth, thin, light [213] n/a n/a or mismatch. In the presence of redundant sensory information, their integration can increase signal strength and reliability, and thus semantic congruency becomes a critical factor in multisensory behavioral performance. ...
... In Table 1, we summarize a set of cross-modal correspondences that have been shown to influence participants' performance. Cross-modal correspondences were demonstrated between various pairs of stimuli: pitch was shown to change the perception on different gustatory dimensions (high pitch was matched with sweet/sour taste, while low pitch was matched with bitter taste [10,29,30]). High pitch was associated also with fruity smells [31,182] and in the haptic dimension with cold water [212]. ...
Mulsemedia—multiple sensorial media—makes possible the inclusion of layered sensory stimulation and interaction through multiple sensory channels. The recent upsurge in technology and wearables provides mulsemedia researchers a vehicle for potentially boundless choice. However, in order to build systems that integrate various senses, there are still some issues that need to be addressed. This review deals with mulsemedia topics that remain insufficiently explored by previous work, with a focus on the multi-multi (multiple media-multiple senses) perspective, where multiple types of media engage multiple senses. Moreover, it addresses the evolution of previously identified challenges in this area and formulates new exploration directions.
... The influence of music and sounds on food perception has been of recent interest. Researchers have investigated the effects of sound on food perception using single instrumental sounds (Crisinel & Spence, 2009;Crisinel & Spence, 2010;Spence & Shankar, 2010), jazz drums (Seo & Hummel, 2011), background music (Dubé, Chebat, & Morin, 1995;Dubé & Morin, 2001;Kantono et al., 2016a;Kantono et al., 2016b), environmental sounds (Kantono et al., 2016c), and everyday soundscapes (Carvalho et al., 2015b). North (2012) reported that music style influenced perceptions of wine, while other studies demonstrated the influence of music on both the perception of chocolate (Carvalho et al., 2015b;Carvalho, Wang, van Ee, Persoone, & Spence, 2017) and hedonic ratings of beer (; Carvalho et al., 2015a;Carvalho et al., 2015b). ...
... Liked and disliked music evoked sweetness and bitterness respectively, similar to previous studies (Kantono et al., 2016a;Kantono et al., 2016b). Our study was the first to show the association of flavours with music, in contrary to previous findings by Crisinel and Spence (2010) who found weak/no associations between flavour tastants (i.e. vanilla, rose, coffee) and pitch tones. ...
... Other studies have found similar consistencies in sound-taste mappings, particularly with pitch. Overall, high-pitched sounds were more frequently associated with either sweet and/or sour tastes Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010a, 2010bKnöferle et al., 2015;Reinoso-Carvalho, Wang, de Causmaecker, et al., 2016;Velasco et al., 2014;, whereas low pitched sounds were more frequently associated with bitter tastes Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010bKnöferle et al., 2015;Qi et al., 2020;Reinoso-Carvalho, Wang, de Causmaecker, et al., 2016;Velasco et al., 2014;Watson & Gunther, 2017). Associations between basic tastes and musical instruments have also been documented, for example, between sweetness and piano or bitterness and brass (Crisinel & Spence, 2010b). ...
Music is a ubiquitous stimulus known to influence human affect, cognition, and behavior. In the context of eating behavior, music has been associated with food choice, intake and, more recently, taste perception. In the latter case, the literature has reported consistent patterns of association between auditory and gustatory attributes, suggesting that individuals reliably recognize taste attributes in musical stimuli. This study presents subjective norms for a new set of 100 instrumental music stimuli, including basic taste correspondences (sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, sourness), emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise), familiarity, valence, and arousal. This stimulus set was evaluated by 329 individuals (83.3% women; Mage = 28.12, SD = 12.14), online (n = 246) and in the lab (n = 83). Each participant evaluated a random subsample of 25 soundtracks and responded to self-report measures of mood and taste preferences, as well as the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). Each soundtrack was evaluated by 68 to 97 participants (Mdn = 83), and descriptive results (means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals) are available as supplemental material at osf.io/2cqa5. Significant correlations between taste correspondences and emotional/affective dimensions were observed (e.g., between sweetness ratings and pleasant emotions). Sex, age, musical sophistication, and basic taste preferences presented few, small to medium associations with the evaluations of the stimuli. Overall, these results suggest that the new Taste & Affect Music Database is a relevant resource for research and intervention with musical stimuli in the context of crossmodal taste perception and other affective, cognitive, and behavioral domains.
... According to Jurafsky, "sometimes the sounds of a name are in fact associated with the tastes of food" (2014,169). This assertion is corroborated by Crisinel & Spence (2010) who discovered that bitter tastes were related to food names with low-pitched sound patterns, while sour and sweet tastes were related to names with high-pitched sound patterns. ...
Previous studies of snack names have focused on their psychological impact on consumers in different cultures but have tended to ignore their onomastic features. This study helps to address this gap based on a corpus of 121 snack names extracted from the book Chinese Famous Local Delicious Food and Special Products. This study explores the patterns of syllables, sounds, and name types of snack names compiled in this small-scale corpus. In this investigation, it was found that descriptive names were the dominant type in the corpus and the most frequently described type feature was the food ingredient. Interestingly, metaphorical names in the corpus were in general found to be related to shape similarities. Contrary to previous findings on dish names and drinking brand names in China, the snack names examined in this corpus showed a preference for three-syllable patterns and “light” or “flat” tones. After discussing these and other findings of this research, this paper discusses what insights this study may provide for other name investigations that utilize corpus linguistic approaches.
... The criterion that associations are determined by 'exceeding chance level' is typically used in many studies assessing crossmodal correspondences (e.g. [13,56]), and is closely linked to the defnition of Crossmodal Correspondences, describing them as associations between features that occur at rates far above chance level. Furthermore, given that we did not restrict participants to choose to associate one tangible object with one out of two or three colours, but out of 12 colours, our chance level of fnding an association between a specifc object and a specifc colour is reduced to around 8%. ...
... Lee, Bhatt, & Suri, 2018;Maison et al., 2004). D'autres mesures issues de la littérature de la psychologie ont été adaptées à l'étude du consommateur comme la Lexical Decision Task (De Bondt, Van Kerckhove, & Geuens, 2018; Kwon & Adaval, 2018;Lam, Ho-ying Fu, & Li, 2017), l'Extrisinc Affective Simon Task (Hoefling & Strack, 2008;Tenbült, De Vries, Dreezens, & Martijn, 2008) ou encore le Go/No-Go Association Task (Bassett & Dabbs, 2005;Crisinel & Spence, 2010;Mcrae, Carrabis, Carrabis, & Hamel, 2013). Le point commun de toutes ces méthodes ainsi que l'IAT réside dans l'utilisation du temps de réponse (TR) comme mesure indirecte principale de l'attitude implicite et des processus automatiques. ...
Cette thèse propose de nouvelles méthodologies permettant de mesurer de façon indirecte et quantitative les composantes affectives du consommateur. Dans une première série d’études, nous avons observé que des variables socio-affectives influencent la perception de l’espace. Plus particulièrement, des variables comme l’estime de soi et l’anxiété sociale modèrent la façon dont les individus perçoivent une ouverture. Nos résultats suggèrent que ce type de tâche pourrait être, à terme, utilisée pour évaluer l’effet socio-affectif d’un produit porté. Dans une seconde série d’étude, nous avons analysé le mouvement de la souris lorsque des consommateurs devaient réaliser une tâche de catégorisation dichotomique. Cette méthode semble permettre d’identifier et de hiérarchiser certaines caractéristiques relatives à l’identité d’une marque. Ces résultats suggèrent que cette méthode pourrait être, à terme, utilisée afin de prédire les comportements d’achats. En conclusion, ces travaux proposent de nouvelles mesures indirectes, basées sur des variables sensori-motrices, pour l’étude du consommateur.
... Extrinsic to the food stimulus, sounds such as music in the background can impact taste perception (Crisinel et al., 2012;Knöferle & Spence, 2012; see Spence, 2012 for a detailed review). Certain sounds correspond to different taste experiences, such as sweet tastes and high-pitched sounds as well as bitter tastes and lowpitched sounds (Crisinel & Spence, 2010). In one study (Crisinel et al., 2012), participants were given four identical samples of toffee to consume while wearing headphones. ...
Food has a daily impact on all consumers, requiring frequent evaluations and decisions pre‐consumption, during, and post‐consumption. Given the number of consumer interactions and the complexity of the food consumption process, researchers have increasingly studied food from both a sensory standpoint and cognitive standpoint. In this review, we create a framework for this existing research. Specifically, we discuss research addressing the key sensory drivers of taste perceptions and consumption, including all five senses: vision, olfaction, audition, haptic, and/or taste. We also identify key cognitive contextual drivers of taste perception and consumption within a marketing context, including social cues, atmospherics, branding, and advertising. Building from the extant literature, we generate and propose areas for future food‐related research.
... Overall, studies used stimuli of various modalities, occasionally in a cross-modal design. Besides the exceptional application of gustatory stimuli (Crisinel and Spence 2010), some IAT studies used verbal and non-verbal auditory stimuli (Anikin and Johansson 2019; Lehnert, Krolak-Schwerdt, and Hörstermann 2018b; Pantos and Perkins 2012;Vande Kamp 2002). Additionally, online versions have been successfully applied in social sciences and sociolinguistics (Friese, Bluemke, and Wänke 2007;Roessel, Schoel, and Stahlberg 2018;Xu, Nosek, and Greenwald 2014) Participants Participants were recruited through the local media, and a certain degree of disclosure was necessary to attract interest. ...
Language maintenance research generally argues that providing
endangered varieties with a standard impacts positively their vitality by e.g. increasing positive attitudes. This paper investigates whether
different degrees of linguistic proximity between vernacular varieties
and the standard may lead to different speakers’ attitudes towards the
vernacular varieties. Following sociopsychological models of implicit
automatic attitudes, e.g. dual attitude models, we hypothesised that
varieties that have a more linguistically close standard would elicit more
positive attitudes. We then used an online Auditory Implicit Association
Test to investigate attitudes towards vernacular Moselle Franconian
varieties in two speech communities, the Belgische Eifel in Belgium and
the Éislek in Luxembourg. Moselle Franconian is considered generally
vulnerable (UNESCO), and the two speech communities have opted for
different methods of introducing a standard variety. While the speech
community of Luxembourg created an ‘own’ linguistically close
standard (Standard Luxembourgish), the Belgian speech community
relies on a more linguistically distant standard, namely Standard
German. Results show that linguistic distance between the standard
and its vernaculars can impact on speakers’ attitudes. Our findings have important implications for the role of standardisation processes in language maintenance efforts.
... Shams and Seitz (2008) believe that life experience involves constant multisensory stimulation and it is likely that our brain operates best in multisensory environments. Crisinel and Spence (2010) also state that our everyday perception of the world is very often multisensory. There are everyday life examples in which a combination of olfactory and auditory cues are perceived, for instance, experiencing the aroma of food while hearing the mastication process. ...
Purpose:
Perfume is arguably one of the most challenging experience products offered online. This article explores how the associations between the human senses of olfaction and audition can help consumers recognize the characteristics of the scent in the absence of the real scent.
Method:
Given the scarcity of contributions regarding online shopping behavior for perfume, an exploratory qualitative approach was implemented. Twenty-seven in-depth interviews were conducted among individuals from three countries with prior experience of purchasing perfume online.
Results:
The study highlights the associations made by the interviewees between the types of sounds/voice and types of scents and the complementary role of these cues in online shopping of perfume.
Practical implications:
Both e-sellers and e-buyers can benefit from the findings of this research. In fact, it is likely that e-shoppers decide to either consider or ignore an unknown perfume for purchase based on the scent signals perceived from sounds, which can provide guidance for e-sellers as well.
... Though brands recognize the importance of sonic branding, the research in this area is still relatively sparse (Graakjaer & Bonde, 2018;Spence & Wang, 2015;Wang & Spence, 2019). A large body of research has explored the link between music/sound and taste attributes (e.g., Crisinel & Spence, 2009, 2010. However, to the best of our knowledge, research on the influence of sounds associated with the interaction with Fig. 1. ...
One common definition of premiumness is as a higher quality and more expensive variant of
a product than other members of the category or reference class. Brand premiumness can effectively be conveyed by means of different sensory cues of brand touchpoints (e.g., colours, sounds, weight). However, to date, research linking the sound of a
product’s packaging with premiumness is sparse. In the present study, we demonstrate for the first time that consumers associate different levels of beer premiumness with the sounds of opening and pouring of bottles and cans. We report the results of two online experiments. Experiment 1 explored the effect of two sound properties associated with beer can and bottle opening and pouring (sound pressure and frequency) on the perception of premiumness. Experiment 2 used semantic differentials (e.g., good-bad, passive-active) to evaluate the meanings people tend to associate with different auditory cues. The analyses revealed that participants perceived: 1) bottle sounds to be more premium overall than can sounds, 2) pouring sounds as more premium than opening sounds, and 3) higher pressure sounds as more premium than lower pressure sounds. Additionally, premiumness was positively correlated with semantic differentials of dead-alive, and the evaluative terms of sad-happy, awful-nice, and bad-good, which highlights the perceived quality and premium character of a beer when conveyed auditorily.
... Thus, we can state that the choice of a fruit depends on crossmodal correspondences between several factors. "Crossmodal correspondences have been defined as a tendency for a sensory feature, or attribute, in one modality, either physically present or merely imagined, to be matched (or associated) with a sensory feature in another sensory modality" [3] Crossmodal associations among taste, flavor or odour and other sensory dimensions have been reported in many papers regarding food product acceptance ( [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]), where this term is used to refer to compatibility effect between some attributes, such as colour and different other qualities of food product. As non-verbal elements, food colours can influence consumer's sensory and hedonic expectations. ...
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an important criterion in determining consumers' fruit choice is not only the sensory properties, but consumer's previous information acquired on fruit which can be turned into beliefs and preferences. The starting point consists of the following aspects: to establish the frequency of consumption of fruit, to determine fruit varieties associated with the colour preferred by consumers; to identify the considerations according to which a person would choose a certain type of fruit and to analyse consumer's feedback on product sensorial properties, to study consumer's attitudes in the choice of a fruit and to understand the influence of colour on consumer's choice of fruit.
... The term "crossmodal correspondence" refers to our cognitive system's inclination to favorably associate specific dimensions of stimuli across sensory modalities (e.g., Klapetek, Ngo, & Spence, 2012). In particular, studies in the field of food science have demonstrated how people match, with above-chance accuracy, certain musical features with different tastes and flavors (e.g., Bronner et al., 2012;Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010bMesz, Sigman, & Trevisan, 2011). For example, Wang, Woods, & Spence (2015) tested specifically designed soundtracks used in other experiments in a matching task (e.g., Knoeferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;Mesz et al., 2012) to determine which soundtracks exhibited the strongest association with one of the four basic tastes (bitter, salty, sour, sweet). ...
Research using short musical sequences and musical tracks created by means of computer algorithms has demonstrated that individuals with or without musical skills can match these soundtracks to specific tastes with above-chance accuracy. More recently, a study that investigated implicit effects associated with crossmodal congruency/incongruency between auditory cues and food images found that such soundtracks are effective in eliciting facilitating effects of taste quality classification with congruent food images as well. In the present study, we tested whether this crossmodal congruency between auditory cues and food images may also influence food image choice by means of a forced-choice task. We selected and used sweet and salty soundtracks as stimuli and food images including both low- and high-calorie exemplars and asked participants to select which food they would prefer to eat (one sweet and one salty) while listening to the soundtracks. We found a general greater proportion of food choices in the soundtracks matching tastes conditions, and that soundtracks matching tastes are effective in influencing congruent food image choices, supporting previous research and adding new interesting outcomes.
... According to Spence (2020), pitch may be the single most investigated auditory parameter in crossmodal correspondences to date. For example, while sweet and sour tastes are commonly associated with high pitch, bitterness is frequently linked to a low pitch sound (Crisinel & Spence, 2010;Knöferle, Woods, Käppler, & Spence, 2015;. These correspondences are in essence based on simple auditory tones. ...
Sound can have a profound impact on our eating experience and behavior. The term “sonic seasoning”, arising from crossmodal correspondences, denotes the tendency for soundtracks with congruent taste/flavor attributes to alter people’s food perception. However, the implicit behavior effects of such sound-taste correspondence have not yet been tested. Employing eye-tracking technology, the current study explored the influence of custom-composed taste-congruent soundtracks on visual attention to food, and how this audio-visual relationship differs across cultures. Seventy-two participants (37 Chinese; 35 Danish) were each exposed to three sound conditions (“sweet music”, “salty music”, no music) while observing different food items in a choice paradigm. Across both cultures, participants spent more time fixating on sweet food while listening to “sweet music” and salty food when listening to “salty music”, while no differences were observed in the no music condition. Danish participants had, regardless of sound condition, longer fixation times on the food images compared to their Chinese counterparts. Participants’ choices in each sound condition were consistent with fixation time spent, implying a clear congruency effect between music and choice behavior. Our findings provide evidence of how specifically tailored music can guide consumers’ visual attention to specific food items, suggesting that the brain indeed integrates multiple streams of sensory information during decision-making. The cross-cultural aspect of our study can ultimately be valuable for understanding auditory nudging in different market segments.
... rounded) shapes, typefaces, and high-pitched sounds. Research on sour taste has also found that it is associated with higher-pitched sounds (Lowe, Ringler, & Haws, 2018) and timbres (Crisinel & Spence, 2010), or "sour" music (Kontukoski et al., 2015), as well as color intensity (Shankar, Levitan, Prescott, & Spence, 2009), and background colors (Woods & Spence, 2016). Sour taste has also been shown to be related to increased blood flow in the face (Kashima & Hayashi, 2011), a higher heart rate (Robin, Rousmans, Dittmar, & Vernet-Maury, 2003), and even a sense of gravity (Tu et al., 2018). ...
This paper draws on the theory of embodied cognition to argue that sensory imagery and consumer recall of past experiences of sour tastes inspire sour taste perceptions that trigger facial muscle activation, which in turn leads to temptation avoidance. Across four experiments, we show that physical action need not be performed to elicit temptation avoidance. Moreover, our findings show that the effects of visual gustatory imagery are more pronounced when presented against a visual red background low on color saturation. Interestingly, they are not significant in the presence of a high color saturation background. We also discuss the implications of these findings for sensory marketing, alternative consumer strategies to avoid temptation, and visual brand management in the consumer experience economy.
... The levels and types of noise could also affect the perception of a gustatory cue. Crisinel and Spence (2010) showed that the pitch of sound was associated with different tastes of food. For example, low pitch sounds were associated with bitter and salty foods, while high pitch sounds were associated with sweet and sour foods. ...
The liking of food in the presence of background noise has been associated with the noise type and level. So far, however, there have been few studies investigating the non-acoustic factors associated with food perception in the presence of background noise. This study investigated the food liking due to three non-acoustic factors (i.e. gender, noise sensitivity and age) in the presence of background noise, relative to the ambient background noise (i.e. no noise conditions). Fifteen participants rated the liking of food via questionnaires. The perceptual relative food liking due to age, gender and noise sensitivity at different noise types and levels were presented. The results indicated that age, noise sensitivity and gender influence relative food liking. Females had lower liking ratings of food than males (p=0.038). Noise sensitivity was also negatively correlated with the relative liking of food (r=-0.72, p<0.001). Sensitive participants gave lower relative food liking ratings (p=0.023). The older participants also gave lower relative food liking ratings (p=0.01). A better understanding of acoustic and non-acoustic factor effects on food perception can be an important area of interest in noise management of dining areas. These results also provide an opportunity for future practical and educational applications. These include a better service that could be presented from food providers and more practical acoustic design of dining areas to suit different groups of people.
... Furthermore, these matches can be more than merely cross-modal associations, with sounds sometimes being shown to modulate the perception of flavours as well . Numerous studies have now robustly demonstrated that high pitches are mapped on to sour tastes (Bronner et al., 2012;Crisinel and Spence, 2010b;Kontukoski et al., 2015;Mesz et al., 2011Mesz et al., , 2012Simner et al., 2010;. A number of cross-modal correspondences between sounds (pitch) and odours have also been identified (Belkin et al., 1997;Crisinel and Spence, 2011). ...
... Furthermore, these matches can be more than merely cross-modal associations, with sounds sometimes being shown to modulate the perception of flavours as well . Numerous studies have now robustly demonstrated that high pitches are mapped on to sour tastes (Bronner et al., 2012;Crisinel and Spence, 2010b;Kontukoski et al., 2015;Mesz et al., 2011Mesz et al., , 2012Simner et al., 2010;. A number of cross-modal correspondences between sounds (pitch) and odours have also been identified (Belkin et al., 1997;Crisinel and Spence, 2011). ...
Associations between heaviness and bass/low-pitched sounds reverberate throughout music, philosophy, literature, and language. Given that recent research into the field of cross-modal correspondences has revealed a number of robust relationships between sound and flavour, this exploratory study was designed to investigate the effects of lower frequency sound (10 Hz to 200 Hz) on the perception of the mouthfeel character of palate weight/body. This is supported by an overview of relevant cross-modal studies and cultural production. Wines were the tastants — a New Zealand Pinot Noir and a Spanish Garnacha — which were tasted in silence and with a 100 Hz (bass) and a higher 1000 Hz sine wave tone. Aromatic intensity was included as an additional character given suggestions that pitch may influence the perception of aromas, which might presumably affect the perception of wine body. Intensity of acidity and liking were also evaluated. The results revealed that the Pinot Noir wine was rated as significantly fuller-bodied when tasted with a bass frequency than in silence or with a higher frequency sound. The low frequency stimulus also resulted in the Garnacha wine being rated as significantly more aromatically intense than when tasted in the presence of the higher frequency auditory stimulus. Acidity was rated considerably higher with the higher frequency in both wines by those with high wine familiarity and the Pinot Noir significantly better liked than the Garnacha. Possible reasons as to why the tones used in this study affected perception of the two wines differently are discussed. Practical application of the findings are also proposed.
... Furthermore, these matches can be more than merely cross-modal associations, with sounds sometimes being shown to modulate the perception of flavours as well . Numerous studies have now robustly demonstrated that high pitches are mapped on to sour tastes (Bronner et al., 2012;Crisinel and Spence, 2010b;Kontukoski et al., 2015;Mesz et al., 2011Mesz et al., , 2012Simner et al., 2010;. A number of cross-modal correspondences between sounds (pitch) and odours have also been identified (Belkin et al., 1997;Crisinel and Spence, 2011). ...
Several studies have examined how music may affect the evaluation of food and drink, but the vast majority have not observed how this interaction unfolds in time. This seems to be quite relevant, since both music and the consumer experience of food/drink are time-varying in nature. In the present study we sought to fix this gap, using Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS), a method developed to record the dominant sensory attribute at any given moment in time, to examine the impact of music on the wine taster’s perception. More specifically, we assessed how the same red wine might be experienced differently when tasters were exposed to various sonic environments (two pieces of music plus a silent control condition). The results revealed diverse patterns of dominant flavours for each sound condition, with significant differences in flavour dominance in each music condition as compared to the silent control condition. Moreover, musical correspondence analysis revealed that differences in perceived dominance of acidity and bitterness in the wine were correlated in the temporality of the experience, with changes in basic auditory attributes. Potential implications for the role of attention in auditory flavour modification and opportunities for future studies are discussed.
... It is thus conceivable that a larger sample or a precise measure of expertise would have revealed an effect. However, the non-existent group differences fit with what Crisinel and Spence (2010b) found when they used a version of the implicit association test in order to find out if pitch was associated with basic tastes. Here, music experts and novices both revealed such associations. ...
Previous research has shown that auditory cues can influence the flavor of food and drink. For instance, wine tastes better when preferred music is played. We have investigated whether a music background can modify judgments of the specific flavor pattern of a beverage, as opposed to mere preference. This was indeed the case. We explored the nature of this crosstalk between auditory and gustatory perception, and hypothesized that the ‘flavor’ of the background music carries over to the perceived flavor (i.e., descriptive and evaluative aspects) of beverages. First, we collected ratings of the subjective flavor of different music pieces. Then we used a between-subjects design to cross the music backgrounds with taste evaluations of several beverages. Participants tasted four different samples of beverages under two contrasting audio conditions and rated their taste experiences. The emotional flavor of the music had the hypothesized effects on the flavor of the beverages. We also hypothesized that such an effect would be stronger for music novices than for music experts, and weaker for aqueous solutions than for wines. However, neither music expertise nor liquid type produced additional effects. We discuss implications of this audio-gustatory interaction.
... Although a link between taste and sound may not be intuitive at a first glance, correspondences between taste or flavor and sound have been repeatedly demonstrated in recent years in several studies. For example, higher-pitch notes were found to match with sweet and sour, and lower-pitch notes with bitter taste, umami, and salty taste (Crisinel & Spence, 2010a, 2010b and these correspondences were influenced by the type of instrument used to play the notes such that notes played by brass were most associated with bitter but also with sour and salty and notes played by a piano were strongly associated with sweet taste. (Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010) also observed a mapping of the four basic tastes and different aspects of sound: using multidimensional scaling they found a complex yet consistent pattern that confirms the existence of a taste-sound correspondence with sweet being associated with lower frequencies and spectral balance, which stands in contrast to (Crisinel et al., 2012), who observed that higher frequencies were associated with sweet, lower frequencies associated with bitter taste. ...
Music has been associated with taste and shown to influence the dining experience. We asked whether sound that is associated with taste affects taste perception of food. In two studies (study 1: N = 20, 13 women; study 2: N = 20, 17 women), participants evaluated the taste of cinder toffee while listening to either of two soundscapes associated with sweet and bitter taste, respectively, or no sound. In study 1, participants rated the taste on a visual‐analog scale (VAS) anchored with “bitter” and “sweet”, aiming to replicate a previous study (Crisinel et al., 2012). In contrast, four separate scales were used in study 2 to report the extent of bitter, sweet, sour, and salty taste to test whether taste qualities were influenced by sound differentially. Additionally, taste intensity and pleasantness were rated in both studies. Taste intensity was increased in the presence of a sound, while pleasantness was not affected. In study 1, sound shifted bitter‐sweet ratings in the direction of the congruent sound, i.e. samples tasted sweeter with “sweet” sound and more bitter with “bitter” sound, replicating Crisinel et al.'s (2012) results. However, this effect was abolished when a “no‐sound” control was included in the statistical model. Taste ratings in study 2 showed no effect of sound on any specific taste quality, suggesting that the influence of sound on taste in study 1 reflects an artifact of the scale rather than an actual shift in perception. Together, the data provide evidence for taste‐sound correspondences without effects on taste‐quality specific perception.
... Por otra parte, es relevante considerar que las distintas formas de sinestesia que pueden alentarse a través de la percepción multisensorial, incluso a un nivel que consideraríamos "trivial", presentan realidad psicológica. Así, Westbury (2005) sugiere un simbolismo formal del sonido (palabras cortas y secas contornos aristados, palabras abiertas contornos suaves), y Crisinel y Spence (2010) plantean la asociación de sabores con tonos musicales (sabores agridulces notas agudas, sabores amargos notas graves). ...
... The appropriateness (e.g., the extent to which it is a good match) of a typeface, shape features, and other design elements which are used in relation with food and drink products can add or subtract value to the communication of specific meanings. Currently, most of the research on crossmodal correspondences associated with tastes has focused on a pair of sensory features, such as a shape curvature and taste (e.g., Velasco et al., 2016c, for a review), colour hue and taste (e.g., Spence et al., 2015), or pitch and taste (e.g., Crisinel and Spence, 2010). Nevertheless, in our everyday lives, we experience several cues at a time. ...
People associate specific shape properties with basic taste attributes (such as sweet, bitter, and sour). It has been suggested that more preferred visual aesthetic features are matched to sweetness whereas less-preferred features are matched with tastes such as bitter and sour instead. Given the range of visual aesthetic features that have been shown to be associated with typeface designs, it would seem reasonable to suggest that typefaces might therefore be associated with specific taste properties as well. Should that be the case, one might then wonder whether viewing text presented in, say, a rounder typeface would also potentially influence the perception of sweetness, as compared to viewing the same information when presented in a more angular typeface. Here, we summarize the latest findings supporting the existence of a crossmodal correspondence between typeface features, in particular curvilinearity, and basic tastes. Moreover, we present initial evidence that suggests that, under certain circumstances, typeface curvilinearity can influence taste ratings. Given such evidence, it can be argued that typeface may well be an important, if often neglected, aspect of our everyday lives which can be potentially useful in the design of food and drink product and brand experiences.
... Faster tempo in music was also associated with sour taste (Knoeferle, Woods, Ka¨ppler, & Spence, 2015). Both sour and sweet food item names were associated with high-pitched sounds (Crisinel & Spence, 2010), while rough musical sound was associated more with bitter and sour tastes and less with sweet tastes (Knoeferle et al., 2015). Fabrics presented with a lemon smell, in contrast to an animal-like smell, were perceived as softer (Dematte, Sanabria, Sugarman, & Spence, 2006). ...
The present work aimed to systematically examine sensory and higher level correspondences to angular and curved shapes. Participants matched angular and curved abstract shapes to sensory experiences in five different modalities as well as to emotion, gender, and name attributes presented as written labels (Study 1) and real experiences (Study 2). The results demonstrated nonarbitrary mapping of angular and curved shapes to attributes from all basic sensory modalities (vision, audition, gustation, olfaction, and tactation) and higher level attributes (emotion, gender, and name). Participants associated curved shapes with sweet taste, quiet or calm sound, vanilla smell, green color, smooth texture, relieved emotion, female gender, and wide-vowel names. In contrast, they associated angular shapes with sour taste, loud or dynamic sound, spicy or citrus smell, red color, rough texture, excited or surprise emotion, male gender, and narrow-vowel names. These prevalent correspondences were robust across different shape pairs as well as all sensory and higher level attributes, presented as both verbal labels and real sensory experiences. The second goal of this research was to examine the relationship between the shape correspondences and individual differences in emotional processing, assessed by self-report and performance measures. The results suggest that heightened emotional ability is associated with making shape attributions that go along with the found prevalent trends.
... The difference in response time between the congruent and incongruent conditions reveals the strength of the implicit association. Variants of the IAT have been successfully adapted to nonsocial stimuli and used to test crossmodal correspondences between odors and touch (Dematte, Sanabria, & Spence, 2007), audition and touch (Occelli et al., 2009), taste and pitch (Crisinel & Spence, 2010), and audition and vision (Parise & Spence, 2012). The task always requires sorting four kinds of stimuli using only two response buttons, each of which refers to two of the four stimuli. ...
... This result may reflect the fact that participants associate the curved shape of the sides of the glass with the rounded shape of many fruits. Research has shown that people develop associations between seemingly unrelated stimulus features, and these associations can play a role in how we perceive the taste of many foods and drinks (see Crisinel, Jones, & Spence, 2012;Crisinel & Spence, 2010;Velasco, Woods, Deroy, & Spence, 2015). ...
It is often said that our perception of wine varies as a function of the receptacle in which it is presented. Indeed, glassware has been the subject of extensive study in this category. By contrast, the impact of glassware on the perception of beer has been largely ignored in the field of sensory science research. The current study was specifically designed to investigate the influence of the shape (specifically side curvature) of the glass on people’s perception of beer. Fifty-three Australian participants rated (on 10-point Likert scales) a beer presented in one of two glasses. The beer was perceived as being fruitier and more intense when served in a curved-sided glass. Given previous research showing that people match fruitiness with curvature (rather than straightness/angularity), these results fit within the existing literature on crossmodal correspondences between shape and taste properties.
... Crossmodal associations involving the chemical senses have attracted relatively little attention in the past (although see Holt-Hansen, 1968;Holt-Hansen, 1976;Rudmin & Cappelli, 1983, for exceptions). However, sparked in part by case studies of synaesthetes (e.g., Beeli, Esslen, & Jäncke, 2005; see also Cytowic, 1993), several recent studies have recently started to uncover and explore such crossmodal associations (sometimes also called synaesthetic correspondences; see Spence, 2011) between tastes/flavours and musical notes (Crisinel & Spence, 2009;Crisinel & Spence, 2010a;Crisinel & Spence, 2010b), tastes and sounds (Simner, Cuskley, & Kirby, 2010), food and the speech sounds present in non-words (Gallace, Boschin, & Spence, 2010;Ngo, Misra, & Spence, 2011), odours and colours (Demattè, Sanabria, & Spence, 2006;Gilbert, Martin, & Kemp, 1996;Schifferstein & Tanudjaja, 2004), and odours and abstract symbols (Seo et al., 2010). However, the basis for these crossmodal associations is still poorly understood. ...
We report a series of experiments investigating crossmodal correspondences between various food-related stimuli (water-based solutions, milk-based flavoured solutions, crisps, chocolate and odours) and sounds varying in pitch and played by four different types of musical instruments. Participants tasted or smelled stimuli before matching them to a musical note. Our results demonstrate that participants preferentially match certain stimuli to specific pitches and instrument types. Through participants’ ratings of the stimuli along a number of dimensions (e.g., pleasantness, complexity, familiarity or sweetness), we explore the psychological dimensions involved in these crossmodal correspondences, using principal components analysis (PCA). While pleasantness seems to play an important role in the choice of instrument associated with chemosensory stimuli, the pitch seems to also depend on the quality of the taste (bitter, salty, sour or sweet). The level at which such crossmodal correspondences might occur, as well as the potential applications of such results, will be discussed.
La synesthésie est une condition neurologique dans laquelle une stimulation sensorielle ou cognitive dans une modalité spécifique engendre de façon automatique et involontaire une autre expérience perceptuelle inhabituelle. La synesthésie influencerait le développement de certaines habiletés cognitives, notamment sur le plan mnésique. Par ailleurs, une hypothèse intuitive populaire au sein de la communauté scientifique stipule que ces expériences sensorielles atypiques facilitent la créativité. En effet, comme elles dotent d’un répertoire perceptuel original, il est concevable qu’elles puissent mener à une aptitude à faire des associations non conventionnelles entre diverses catégories d’éléments. Par conséquent, cette recherche qualitative vise à mieux comprendre les influences des expériences synesthésiques sur la créativité, du point de vue de ceux qui vivent ces expériences. Dans le but de mieux comprendre la phénoménologie de la synesthésie en créativité, les questions de notre recherche se résument ainsi : Quel sens peut avoir l’expérience de la synesthésie en créativité et quelles répercussions a-t-elle sur la créativité? Nous sommes intéressés à comprendre comment la synesthésie peut être perçue, avoir de l’influence et être utilisée lors d’un processus créatif. À notre connaissance, il s’agit de la première étude à explorer la phénoménologie de la synesthésie tant auprès de plusieurs individus qu’au sein de plusieurs formes de synesthésie, à l’égard d’une caractéristique soi-disant centrale à cette condition, soit la créativité.
Dans le cadre de cette recherche, 17 personnes avec diverses synesthésies, âgées de 21 ans à 72 ans, ont été rencontrées afin de partager leurs expériences lors d’entretiens individuels semi-dirigés. Ces entrevues ont été retranscrites et analysées d’après la méthode phénoménologique de recherche en psychologie. Au final, la structure fondamentale du phénomène étudié qui émerge de nos analyses comprend les 10 thèmes suivant en ce qui a trait au sens donné à l’expérience de la synesthésie sur le plan de la créativité :
1) L’expérience de la synesthésie oriente, module le processus créatif en fonction des associations synesthésiques afin d’être dans un état particulier et d’accroître le bien-être;
2) L’expérience de la synesthésie constitue un apport sensoriel, perceptuel et émotionnel à la créativité;
3) L’expérience de la synesthésie optimise les fonctions cognitives;
4) L’expérience de la synesthésie alimente la stimulation intellectuelle et la motivation dans un processus créatif;
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5) L’expérience de la synesthésie donne un sens à des éléments et à un vécu;
6) L’expérience de la synesthésie est perçue comme un système instinctif qui influence la créativité, une intuition à l’origine d’un processus de décision ou un réflexe consistant à transposer des associations qui sont indépendantes de la cognition;
7) L’expérience de la synesthésie permet de mieux se connaître, de s’identifier, d’exprimer et d’assumer ce qui constitue son individualité;
8) L’expérience de la synesthésie constitue une courroie de communication avec autrui, d’échange avec d’autres réalités;
9) L’expérience de la synesthésie peut ne pas avoir d’influence sur la créativité; les associations synesthésiques peuvent être perçues comme des états de faits qui sont d’utilité pratique et qui n’ont pas de répercussion sur les choix face à des besoins;
10) L’expérience de la synesthésie peut être un frein à la créativité.
La présente étude a permis de développer une meilleure compréhension des composantes de la créativité, de faire avancer l’état des connaissances sur les expériences synesthésiques et d’identifier le coeur de leurs influences sur la créativité. Pour la première fois, l’étendue des avantages et des inconvénients des expériences synesthésiques sur la créativité a été exposée. Mener cette étude auprès de synesthètes qui présentent une variété de synesthésies a aussi permis d’identifier des processus sous-jacents à la créativité qui sont communs dans le vaste spectre de la synesthésie et d’amener des pistes d’explications quant aux différences individuelles pouvant émerger. Du coup, divers processus qui peuvent influencer et alimenter la créativité chez tous les individus ont été mis en lumière. Enfin, cette recherche peut apporter un éclairage sur les mécanismes universels d’interactions entre les sens et sur leur usage à certaines fins. De futures études avec de larges échantillons de participants devraient tenter de départager différents attributs de la synesthésie et d’explorer leur contribution respective dans divers aspects de la cognition et des émotions. Les répercussions de l’exploitation d’associations automatiques, synesthésiques ou non, pourraient aussi faire l’objet d’études dans les cadres d’interventions thérapeutiques et pédagogiques. Enfin, la mise sur pied de regroupements de chercheurs en synesthésie et de synesthètes pourrait stimuler le développement et la diffusion des connaissances sur la synesthésie et sur le potentiel humain, démarginaliser cette condition et déconstruire des conceptions erronées, et faire accroître l’épanouissement des individus de la grande communauté synesthète.
How a food, or a dish, is named and how its components and attributes are described can all influence the perception and the enjoyment of the food. Therefore, tracing patterns in food descriptions and determining their role can be of value. The aims of this study were the following: (1) to describe the multisensory food experience as represented in microblog entries concerning food and drink on Twitter, (2) to provide an overview of the changes in the above-mentioned food representations during the period 2011–20, and (3) to contribute to a broader understanding of the human–food relationship as reflected on social media – in this case Twitter – and outline its potential utility for the research field of gastrophysics. The combinations of various multisensory attributes co-occurring in a tweet (which we term ‘collocations’) found in the Twitter corpus were examined through the categories of texture, colour, taste, smell/odour, shape and sound. We mapped the collocations of the 20–25 most frequently mentioned food items and their multisensory experience pairings over time. Such time-based knowledge led to a better understanding of the multisensory experience triggers as reflected on Twitter. By analysing the multisensory experience’s frequency of occurrence, we could conclude that the category of colour is the dominant one, while textural, olfactory and auditory collocations with food are rare. In most of the cases, food tweets appear to render a food experience ‘tasty’, ‘good’ and ‘interesting’.
In this paper, the precedents in the investigation of so-called soundscape in the perception of wine are explained first. They are related to the needs of the current market. Next, the design of an experiment on the subject through a survey is enunciated, which leads to the desire to learn more about the connections between drinking wine and the sound and social environment. Apart from this objective, the authors considered it appropriate to ask about changes in the habit of wine consumption during the pandemic, as well as to study the population that engages in such activity. The results regarding the first question are oriented in a causal direction, i.e., on the basis of data, there does seem to be a certain relationship between some musical genres and drinking a specific type of wine. These results diverge slightly depending on the scenario where consumption occurs. Changes in consumption derived from the pandemic are also reported, aimed at reducing it, with home drinkers having grown in numbers. It is concluded that the favorite combination is rock music and red wine for the general set of scenarios, and a sociological tendency is guessed in the Spanish population to carry out this consumption in large meals and late at night. (*)
Cross-modal correspondence is the tendency to systematically map stimulus features across sensory modalities. The current study explored cross-modal correspondence between speech sound and shape (Experiment 1), and whether such association can influence shape representation (Experiment 2). For the purpose of closely examining the role of the two factors — articulation and pitch — combined in speech acoustics, we generated two sets of 25 vowel stimuli — pitch-varying and pitch-constant sets. Both sets were generated by manipulating articulation — frontness and height of the tongue body’s positions — but differed in terms of whether pitch varied among the sounds within the same set. In Experiment 1, participants made a forced choice between a round and a spiky shape to indicate the shape better associated with each sound. Results showed that shape choice was modulated according to both articulation and pitch, and we therefore concluded that both factors play significant roles in sound–shape correspondence. In Experiment 2, participants reported their subjective experience of shape accompanied by vowel sounds by adjusting an ambiguous shape in the response display. We found that sound–shape correspondence exerts an effect on shape representation by modulating audiovisual interaction, but only in the case of pitch-varying sounds. Therefore, pitch information within vowel acoustics plays the leading role in sound–shape correspondence influencing shape representation. Taken together, our results suggest the importance of teasing apart the roles of articulation and pitch for understanding sound–shape correspondence.
The recent development of various sensory-enabling technologies (SETs) has attracted the interest of those marketers wishing to enhance the online and in-store multisensory experiences that they offer to customers. Such technologies have also proven relevant to the delivery of more engaging multisensory human-food interactions. However, to date, little work has been conducted on their potential role in the interaction between consumers and product packaging, a key element of branding. In this chapter, we present an overview of how the latest SETs can be (and in some cases already are being) incorporated into the packaging of various different products in order to deliver novel multisensory product experiences. We predict that these technologies will increasingly come to enhance the scope of packaging as a marketing communication tool. They might, for instance, be used to project people into consumption experiences, promote brand engagement, as well as improve product evaluation, by means of, say, augmented reality applications. Such technologies will become an increasingly important element in the consumer experience. They may even be able to enhance the perceived sensory properties of products, help in personalization, and/or help regulating our eating behaviour.
This chapter provides an overview of the theories explaining the mechanisms behind automatic behavior, focusing in particular on implicit associations with food items. We explain the implicit association test (IAT), which is the most widely used procedure to capture "internal" associations. We describe its advantages and limitations in consumer research as well as the developments made throughout past years. We then describe the most recent applications of IATs in the food domain and end with a case study, conclusions, and recommendations for future research.
In this, the penultimate chapter, we highlight some of the various ways in which digital technologies are increasingly going to influence, and possibly even transform, our fine dining experiences (not to mention our everyday interactions with food and drink) in the years to come. We distinguish between several uses of technology in this regard, for example: to enhance the taste/flavour of food; to provide entertainment and/or to deliver more memorable experiences around food and drink; and even to help those who want to eat more healthily. We outline the different routes by which digital technologies may arrive at the dining table (and in some cases already have). On the one hand, technology may be provided by the restaurants or bars for the benefit of their patrons; on the other, it may be brought to the table by the diners themselves (most likely via their own handheld portable electronic devices). While many of the former technological innovations will no doubt first make their appearance at the tables of cutting-edge high-end restaurants, the most successful digital interventions will most likely be appearing at the home dining table within a few years. Like it or not, digital technologies are going to constitute an increasingly common feature of the dining table of the future.
We present a partial replication of the crossmodal pitch/taste correspondence of Crisinel and Spence. Male college students (n=46) were asked to judge the pitch (F1-C4 on trombone; F3-C6 on clarinet) that best corresponded with each of four tastants (unsweetened coffee, unsweetened chocolate, salt, and sugar). With trombone there was a significant effect of tastant [F(3,135)=7.574, p<0.001, η²=0.144] with unsweetened chocolate being associated with the lowest pitch and sugar with the highest. With clarinet we did not find a significant effect [F(3,135)=2.468, p=0.065, η²=0.052]. The average across instruments was significant [F(3,135)=4.269, p=0.006, η²=0.087]. When looking at the effect of taster status, we found a significant correlation [r(44)=0.389, p=0.007] with supertasters associating the bitterness of a PTC strip with higher pitches than did nontasters - this is in contrast with Crisinel and Spence's finding of no correlation with taster status. In light of the 'replication crisis' in psychology as found by the Open Science Collaboration, it is noteworthy that this crossmodal pitch/taste correspondence, at least for trombone, was replicated in a different lab.
Music has been known throughout history to promote positive effects on people, and entire industries have been established around music psychology and sound therapies meant to assist with the treatments of human ailments. Much research has been performed in this field, but there is also a significant amount of anecdotal information. This is explored in this chapter, along with the importance of natural sounds, leading to a discussion of the concept of soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how sound is used to influence people and, although this aspect of sound is included in the discussion of positive effects, it is debatable whether this use of sound is positive or negative. All of the information mentioned in the chapter far supports the premise that sound affects people in physiological and psychological ways; however, these effects have, for the most part, been conscious.
The development of neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has provided marketers with the possibility of studying changes in brain activity in relation to marketing information (packaging, pricing, promotions, etc.) and decision-making. When consumers interact with a product, the brain captures and stores the related sensory experience in a multisensory representation in memory. Such memories serve consumers when making their future decisions. Thus, the senses play an important role in consumer behavior and the results of fMRI studies provide an interesting way for sensory marketers to analyze how the brain processes sensory information affecting product perception. In this article, we show how multisensory information, as well as mental simulation, impact taste expectations and subsequently taste, or better-said, flavor, perception in the light of neuroimaging studies. First, we discuss how neural analysis can help to understand the effect of marketing information on taste perception. Second, we highlight the role of gustatory inference on food perception in light of the latest fMRI findings. Third, we suggest some directions to improve the understanding of crossmodal correspondences in the context of consumer sensory experiences.
Consumption experiences typically involve inputs from multiple sensory modalities. However, consumer research has seldom investigated how multiple sensory inputs may interact to affect such experiences. This research examines whether inputs from one sensory modality can influence the experience of a stimulus in another sensory modality. In a series of experiments, we find that shapes (jagged versus rounded) or lighting (bright versus dim) presented in temporal proximity to a gustatory stimulus influences participants' taste judgments as well as consumption. These findings suggest a correspondence between sensory stimuli that are typically thought to belong to categorically distinct sensory modalities.
The emerging picture of taste coding at the periphery is one of elegant simplicity. Contrary to what was generally believed, it is now clear that distinct cell types expressing unique receptors are tuned to detect each of the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami. Importantly, receptor cells for each taste quality function as dedicated sensors wired to elicit stereotypic responses.
Expectations are generated by a variety of factors. We indicate a flow chart for the role of expectations at the point of choice and in influencing sensory perception at the time of consumption. We review the sparse literature on how advertising, packaging and information generate sensory expectations. The application of various theories to explain the observed effects of sensory expectations are reviewed. There is overwhelming evidence for assimilation-contrast effect, although no studies have been specifically designed to detect it. Finally we review the reasons why individuals might differ in the way that expectations influence sensory perception. These reasons include ideas from persuasion literature and private body consciousness. A number of behavioral hypothesis that follow from these theories are developed.
We develop a conceptual framework regarding the perceptual transfer of haptic or touch-related characteristics from product containers to judgments of the products themselves. Thus, the firmness of a cup in which water is served may affect consumers' judgments of the water itself. This framework predicts that not all consumers are equally affected by such nondiagnostic haptic cues. Results from four studies show that consumers high in the autotelic need for touch (general liking for haptic input) are less affected by such nondiagnostic haptic cues compared to consumers low in the autotelic need for touch. The research has many implications for product and package design. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
Some individuals ascribe health symptoms to odor exposures, even when none would be expected based on toxicological dose-effect
relationships. In these situations, symptoms are believed to have been mediated by beliefs regarding the potential health
effects from odorants, which implies a controlled type of information processing. From an evolutionary perspective, such a
form of processing may hardly be the only route. The aim of the present study was to explore the viability of a fast and implicit
route, by investigating automatic odor-related associations in the context of health. An Implicit Association Test assessing
association strengths between the concept odor and the concepts healthy and sick was conducted. Three experiments (N = 66, N = 64, and N = 64) showed a significantly stronger association between the concepts odor and sick than between odor and healthy. These
results did not match explicit associations and provide evidence for a fast and automatic route of processing that may complement
consciously controlled processes. A dual-processing theory of olfactory information is proposed leading to new hypotheses
regarding the development and maintenance of odor-induced health symptoms.
Ten adult men were exposed to four different conditions of noise--low noise (70 dB), loud noise (90 dB), loud music (90 dB) and a silence control--while they tasted sweet or salty solutions. In the first experiment, they rated the pleasure/displeasure aroused by ten gustatory stimuli (five sucrose and five sodium chloride from 0.15 to 2.35 M/l). The median affective rating for sucrose was significantly higher in loud noise and with loud music. No change was observed for salt. In the second experiment, the subjects were invited to mix solutions in order to obtain the most pleasant concentration of sucrose or sodium chloride. Subjects' preferred concentrations of sucrose or sodium chloride did not vary with auditory conditions.
In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) assesses relative strengths of four associations involving two pairs of contrasted concepts (e.g., male-female and family-career). In four studies, analyses of data from 11 Web IATs, averaging 12,000 respondents per data set, supported the following conclusions: (a) sorting IAT trials into subsets does not yield conceptually distinct measures; (b) valid IAT measures can be produced using as few as two items to represent each concept; (c) there are conditions for which the administration order of IAT and self-report measures does not alter psychometric properties of either measure; and (d) a known extraneous effect of IAT task block order was sharply reduced by using extra practice trials. Together, these analyses provide additional construct validation for the IAT and suggest practical guidelines to users of the IAT.
Perceptions of the flavors of foods or beverages reflect information derived from multiple sensory afferents, including gustatory, olfactory, and somatosensory fibers. Although flavor perception therefore arises from the central integration of multiple sensory inputs, it is possible to distinguish the different modalities contributing to flavor, especially when attention is drawn to particular sensory characteristics. Nevertheless, our experiences of the flavor of a food or beverage are also simultaneously of an overall unitary perception. Research aimed at understanding the mechanisms behind this integrated flavor perception is, for the most part, relatively recent. However, psychophysical, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies on cross-modal sensory interactions involved in flavor perception have started to provide an understanding of the integrated activity of sensory systems that generate such unitary perceptions, and hence the mechanisms by which these signals are "functionally united when anatomically separated". Here we review this recent research on odor/taste integration, and propose a model of flavor processing that depends on prior experience with the particular combination of sensory inputs, temporal and spatial concurrence, and attentional allocation. We propose that flavor perception depends upon neural processes occurring in chemosensory regions of the brain, including the anterior insula, frontal operculum, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, as well as upon the interaction of this chemosensory "flavor network" with other heteromodal regions including the posterior parietal cortex and possibly the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex.
Following on from ecological theories of perception, such as the one proposed by [Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin] this paper reviews the literature on the multisensory interactions underlying the perception of flavor in order to determine the extent to which it is really appropriate to consider flavor perception as a distinct perceptual system. We propose that the multisensory perception of flavor may be indicative of the fact that the taxonomy currently used to define our senses is simply not appropriate. According to the view outlined here, the act of eating allows the different qualities of foodstuffs to be combined into unified percepts; and flavor can be used as a term to describe the combination of tastes, smells, trigeminal, and tactile sensations as well as the visual and auditory cues, that we perceive when tasting food.
We explored a range of higher-level percepts in music. Participants were asked to make two-alternative forced-choice judgments of extracts of instrumental music on various dipole categories, such as happy/sad or male/female. The consistency with which each stimulus was judged on a response category across listeners provides an indication of the extent to which the musical percept can be mapped reliably onto that dimension. High consistency would suggest that the response category is related to one of the natural perceptual dimensions for music. We found very high consistency (90% +) for various response categories normally used as descriptions of people (such as male/female and happy/sad). Other types of response category gave much lower consistency. Perhaps our participants are experts in making fine distinctions in person-related categories for almost any stimulus. We tested this with a control experiment where foodstuffs replaced the musical stimuli. We did not find high agreement for person-related categories. The differences between responses to music and food were statistically highly significant.
Flavour is arguably the most fascinating aspect of eating and drinking. It utilises a complex variety of senses and processes, that incredibly work together to generate a unified, and hopefully pleasurable, experience. The processes involved are not just those involved in tasting at the time of eating, but also memory and learning processes - we obviously shun those foods of which we have a negative memory, and favour those we enjoy. Our understanding of the science of flavour has improved in recent years, benefiting psychology, cuisine, food science, oenology, and dietetics. This book describes what is known about the psychology and biology of flavour. The book is divided into two parts. The first explores what we know about the flavour system; including the role of learning and memory in flavour perception and hedonics; the way in which all the senses that contribute to flavour interact, and our ability to perceive flavour as a whole and as a series of parts. The later chapters examine a range of theoretical issues concerning the flavour system. This includes a look at multisensory processing, and the way in which the mind and brain bind information from discrete sensory systems. It also examines the broader implications of studying flavour for societal problems such as obesity.
In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.
We investigated the effects of auditory background noise on the perception of gustatory food properties (sugar level, salt level), food crunchiness and food liking. Participants blindly consumed different foods whilst passively listening to either no sound, or quiet or loud background white noise. The foods were then rated in terms of sweetness, saltiness and liking (Experiment 1) or in terms of overall flavour, crunchiness and liking (Experiment 2). Reported sweetness and saltiness was significantly lower in the loud compared to the quiet sound conditions (Experiment 1), but crunchiness was reported to be more intense (Experiment 2). This suggests that food properties unrelated to sound (sweetness, saltiness) and those conveyed via auditory channels (crunchiness) are differentially affected by background noise. A relationship between ratings of the liking of background noise and ratings of the liking of the food was also found (Experiment 2). We conclude that background sound unrelated to food diminishes gustatory food properties (saltiness, sweetness) which is suggestive of a cross-modal contrasting or attentional effect, whilst enhancing food crunchiness.
Theory is constrained by the quality and versatility of measurement tools. As such, the development of techniques for measurement is critical to the successful development of theory. This paper presents a technique - the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT) - that joins a family of existing techniques for measuring implicit social cognition generally, with a focus on attitude (evaluation). To expand the measurement potential supplied by its closest cousin, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the GNAT can be used to examine automatic social cognition toward a single target category. That is, the GNAT obtains a measure of implicit social cognition without requiring the direct involvement of complementary or contrasting objects. Also, by implementing a response deadline in the procedure, this version of the GNAT trades off response latency for sensitivity as the dependent variable measure. We illustrate the technique through a series of experiments (1-5) using simple attitude objects (bugs and fruit). In Experiment 6, the GNAT is used to investigate attitudes toward race (black and white) and gender (male and female). To explore the theoretical leverage offered by this tool, Experiment 6 puts to test a recurring question concerning automatic in-group favoritism versus out-group derogation. Results demonstrate the dual presence of both out-group derogation (e.g., negativity toward black Americans) and in-group favoritism (positivity toward white Americans), a finding that emerges because the GNAT offers the potential for separable measures of attitude toward the two groups. Through these experiments, the GNAT is shown to be an effective tool for assessing automatic preferences as well as resolving persistent questions that require measures of individual attitude objects while maintaining the advantages of response competition tasks.
Touch plays an important, if often underacknowledged, role in our evaluation/appreciation of many different products. It is unsurprising, therefore, that there has been such a recent growth of interest in “tactile branding” and tactile marketing. This article reviews the evidence from the fields of marketing, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, demonstrating just how important the feel of a product, not to mention the feel of its packaging, can be in determining people's overall product evaluation. Problems for tactile design associated with the growth of the aging population, and the growth of Internet-based shopping, are highlighted. The critical role that touch can play in multisensory product design, appreciation, and marketing is also discussed, as is the increasingly frequent use by marketers of synesthetic correspondences to evoke tactile sensations via the visual and auditory modalities. We put forward the argument that tactile stimulation may influence multisensory product evaluation by means of affective ventriloquism: Our suggestion is that the hedonic attributes of a product perceived via one modality (such as touch) can “pull” (or bias) a person's estimates of the quality and pleasantness of the product derived from other sensory modalities into alignment, and by so doing, modulate a person's overall (multisensory) product experience. What is more, powerful mathematical modeling approaches now exist to predict the magnitude of this kind of intersensory (or crossmodal) interaction effect, hence offering the promise of a more scientific approach to tactile design/marketing in the coming years. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The relationships between biting and chewing sounds and judgments of food crispness were examined in two studies. In the first, subjects used magnitude estimation to separately judge the loudness of chewing sounds and the crispness of a wide range of wet and dry crisp foods. Judgments of perceived crispness and loudness were highly correlated both when food samples were fractured by single bites and when further broken down by chewing. In the second study, biting and chewing sounds were blocked by a loud masking noise. Subjects had no difficulty determining crispness. Correlations between judgments obtained with and without an auditory block were high. It is proposed that vibrations produced by fracturing crisp foods may underlie the perception of crispness.
We investigated whether the perception of the crispness and staleness of potato chips can be affected by modifying the sounds produced during the biting action. Participants in our study bit into potato chips with their front teeth while rating either their crispness or freshness using a computer-based visual analog scale. The results demonstrate that the perception of both the crispness and staleness was systematically altered by varying the loudness and/or frequency composition of the auditory feedback elicited during the biting action. The potato chips were perceived as being both crisper and fresher when either the overall sound level was increased, or when just the high frequency sounds (in the range of 2 kHz−20 kHz) were selectively amplified. These results highlight the significant role that auditory cues can play in modulating the perception and evaluation of foodstuffs (despite the fact that consumers are often unaware of the influence of such auditory cues). The paradigm reported here also provides a novel empiric methodology for assessing such multisensory contributions to food perception.
Subjects from Britain and America were tested on their skill at applying the taste adjectives ‘sweet’, ‘sour’, ‘salty’, and
‘bitter’ to clearly distinguishable solutions of sucrose, citric acid, NaCl and quinine sulphate, respectively. The main error
that occurred was calling citric acid ‘bitter’ while the tendency to call quinine sulphate ‘sour’ was not so common; this
is the well known sour-bitter confusion. A sour-salty confusion was also noted as well as a tendency to call citric acid ‘sweet’.
All these confusions were rectified by mere definition using standards. Skill at applying taste adjectives was not always
found to be consistent over time. More errors occurred at lower solution concentrations, even though stimuli were clearly
distinguishable; indistinguishability of stimuli may account for some confusions in other studies.
Increasing molar concentrations of sweet, sour, bitter and salty were evaluated in colorless and colored (red, green, yellow)
water solutions by 28 untrained students. Green color statistically increased sweet taste threshold sensitivity while yellow
color decreased taste sensitivity. Red color did not affect the taste sensitivity of sweet. In the case of sour, both yellow
and green colors decreased sensitivity with red having no affect. Red color decreased bitter taste sensitivity with yellow
and green color having no effect. No significant differences due to color affected salty taste sensitivity. Thus, psychological
color association can alter reports of certain basic taste sensations.
Our evaluation of food is influenced by a variety of contextual information perceived via the senses. Here we investigated whether there are interactions between auditory stimuli and basic tastes (indicated by the names of typically sour and bitter foods). Participants took part in a version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in order to measure the strength of the association between high-pitched sounds and (the names of) foodstuffs having a sour taste, and between low-pitched sounds and (the names of) foodstuffs having a bitter taste. Analysis of the latency and accuracy of participants' responses highlighted the existence of a significant crossmodal association between these different attributes. This result suggests the need for research into the influence of auditory stimuli on food evaluation, an interaction that has typically been overlooked when considering the multisensory perception of food.
In 1908 Kikunae Ikeda identified the unique taste component of konbu (kelp) as the salt of glutamic acid and coined the term umami to describe this taste. After Ikeda's discovery, other umami taste substances, such as inosinate and guanylate, were identified. Over the past several decades, the properties of these umami substances have been characterized. Recently, umami has been shown to be the fifth basic taste, in addition to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Am J Clin Nutr 2009;90(suppl):719S-22S.
The mental representation elicited by smelling an odor often consists of multiple sensory and affective dimensions; however, the richness of this elaboration is difficult to capture using methods to rate the intensity of these factors in isolation. Attempts to use language descriptors for olfactory experience have also been shown to be rather limited; among nonspecialists, there is no universally accepted system for describing odors, leading to greater reliance on specific item associations. In this study, we explored the utility of semantic differential (SD) scaling for illustrating the various dimensions of olfactory experience. Three hundred volunteers rated 30 distinct odorants using 50 semantic differential scale adjectives. Three factors emerged from the analysis (based on 17 adjective pairs) accounting for 53% of the variance, and corresponding to the evaluation, potency and activity dimensions identified for other stimulus types. SD scaling appears to be a viable method for identifying the multiple dimensions of mental representation evoked when smelling an odorant, and may prove a useful tool for both consumer and basic research alike.
Although numerous methods of classifying odors have been developed, little agreement has been achieved on the dimensions that are useful to both basic and consumer research. The identification of a set of semantic differential adjectives that are relevant to olfactory experience can become a useful tool for classifying the qualitative and affective bases on which odorants differ. In particular, the degree to which odorants evoke multidimensional representations from other sensory modalities (visual, auditory, somatosensory or gustatory) can be usefully applied in the arena of product development both within and across cultures.
9 Ss were requested to perceive simultaneously the taste of beer and a rhythmic sound, the pitch of which could be varied. The frequencies at which Ss experienced harmony between the taste and the sound were determined. At the pitch of harmony Ss reported characteristic experiences, e.g., optimum taste of the beer, rhythmic sensations in the head, and tickling sensations in the jaws and the mouth. 3 Ss also reported experiences resembling those described by persons under the influence of such drugs as mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and cannabis.
Implicit (unconscious) gender stereotyping in fame judgments was tested with an adaptation of a procedure developed by L. L. Jacoby, C. M. Kelley, J. Brown, and J. Jasechko (1989). In Experiments 1-4, participants pronounced 72 names of famous and nonfamous men and women, and 24 or 48 hr later made fame judgments in response to the 72 familiar and 72 unfamiliar famous and nonfamous names. These first experiments, in which signal detection analysis was used to assess implicit stereotypes, demonstrate that the gender bias (greater assignment of fame to male than female names) was located in the use of a lower criterion (beta) for judging fame of familiar male than female names. Experiments 3 and 4 also showed that explicit expressions of sexism or stereotypes were uncorrelated with the observed implicit gender bias in fame judgments.
An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect & pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).
The first portion of this paper describes a behavioral conception of the sign-process as developed from a general mediation theory of learning. The remainder is concerned with the problem of measuring meaning The development of a semantic differential as a general method of measuring meaning is described. It involves (a) the use of factor analysis to determine the number and nature of factors entering into semantic description and judgment, and (b) the selection of a set of specific scales corresponding to these factors." 118-item bibliography.
Although sensory perception and neurobiology are traditionally investigated one modality at a time, real world behaviour and perception are driven by the integration of information from multiple sensory sources. Mounting evidence suggests that the neural underpinnings of multisensory integration extend into early sensory processing. This article examines the notion that neocortical operations are essentially multisensory. We first review what is known about multisensory processing in higher-order association cortices and then discuss recent anatomical and physiological findings in presumptive unimodal sensory areas. The pervasiveness of multisensory influences on all levels of cortical processing compels us to reconsider thinking about neural processing in unisensory terms. Indeed, the multisensory nature of most, possibly all, of the neocortex forces us to abandon the notion that the senses ever operate independently during real-world cognition.
Perceptual interactions between odour and oral texture were explored in a study in which a cream odour was presented ortho- or retronasally at well-defined moments whilst milk-like foods with different viscosities, produced by adding a thickener, were present in the mouth. Gaseous (odour) and liquid (texture) pulses were presented using a specially-developed computer-controlled system of air-dilution olfactometry and pumps. Odour pulses, lasting 2 s, were presented either during a 3-s period in which a liquid filled the oral cavity, during a 3-s period in which the liquid was manipulated orally or during the swallowing of the liquid. Subjects rated the intensity of overall flavour, thickness and creaminess. Perceived flavour intensity was reduced with increasing viscosity of the liquid, irrespective of whether or not the odour was presented ortho- or retronasally. The odour stimulus increased the intensities of thickness and creaminess, but only when the odour was presented retronasally that is as if the odour would have originated from the liquid. Furthermore, this enhancement was most pronounced when odours coincided with swallowing, less pronounced when odours coincided with oral manipulation and absent when presented during mouth filling. The results suggest that cross-modal interactions are the rule rather than the exception, provided that multi-modal sensory integration has occurred.
Further Adventures in Search of Perfection
- H Blumenthal
Blumenthal H, 2007 Further Adventures in Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics (London:
Bloomsbury)
Some demographic and socio-cultural aspects of synesthesia
- S Day
Day S, 2005``Some demographic and socio-cultural aspects of synesthesia'', in Synesthesia:
Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience Eds L C Robertson, N Sagiv (New York: Oxford
University Press) pp 11^33
- R Stevenson
Stevenson R J, 2009 The Psychology of Flavour (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
- D Martin
Martin D, 2007 Evolution (Lausanne: Editions Favre)