Abstract
A within-participants experiment was conducted in two countries (the UK and Colombia) in order to investigate the matching of shapes to taste words. Comparing the two countries allowed us to explore some of the cultural differences that have been reported thus far solely in terms of people's visual preferences. In particular, we addressed the question of whether properties other than angularity influence shape-valence and shape-taste matching (crossmodal correspondences). The participants in the present study repeatedly matched eight shapes, varying in terms of their angularity, symmetry, and number of elements to one of two words—pleasant or unpleasant and sweet or sour. Participants' choices, as well as the latency of their responses, and their hand movements, were evaluated. The participants were more likely to judge those shapes that were rounder, symmetrical, and those shapes that had fewer elements as both pleasant and sweet. Those shapes that were more angular, asymmetrical, and that had a greater number of elements, were more likely to be judged as both unpleasant and sour instead. The evidence presented here therefore suggests that aside from angularity and roundness, both symmetry/asymmetry and the number of elements present in a shape also influence valence and taste categorizations.
Highlights
Research on the crossmodal correspondences, underscores the existence of linguistic, statistical, and structural relations to explain how/why seemingly unrelated information from different senses is matched to one another
It would appear that symmetry/asymmetry and the number of elements seemed to exert the greatest influence as to how the participants matched each shape to a valence word (See Table 1 and Figure 3)
The results demonstrated that roundness/angularity, symmetry/asymmetry, and the number of elements exerted different degrees of influence over the likelihood that a given shape would be matched to a specific valence and taste word
Summary
Research on the crossmodal correspondences ( known as synesthetic correspondences, Martino and Marks, 2001), underscores the existence of linguistic (or semantic), statistical, and structural relations to explain how/why seemingly unrelated information from different senses is matched to one another (see Spence, 2011; Parise and Spence, 2013; Deroy and Spence, 2015, for reviews). Emotional valence (see Kenneth, 1923, for an early example; see Collier, 1996; Lyman, 1979) would seem to provide one plausible mechanism that may help to explain shape-taste correspondences (Spence and Deroy, 2013a). Velasco et al (2015a) recently demonstrated that taste hedonics (as assessed by liking ratings) were correlated with the crossmodal associations that people made between tastes and the roundness/angularity of shapes. These researchers suggested that other shape attributes might be involved in shape-taste matches as well (see Wan et al, 2014; Velasco et al, 2015b,c). Given that crossmodal correspondences are thought to be bidirectional (see Spence, 2011; Deroy et al, 2013; Parise and Spence, 2013), the suggestion is that both taste and shape properties may influence shape-taste matching
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