Abstract
People associate basic tastes (e.g., sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) with specific colors (e.g., pink or red, green or yellow, black or purple, and white or blue). In the present study, we investigated whether a color bordered by another color (either the same or different) would give rise to stronger taste associations relative to a single patch of color. We replicate previous findings, highlighting the existence of a robust crossmodal correspondence between individual colors and basic tastes. On occasion, color pairs were found to communicate taste expectations more consistently than were single color patches. Furthermore, and in contrast to a recent study in which the color pairs were shown side-by-side, participants took no longer to match the color pairs with tastes than the single colors (they had taken twice as long to respond to the color pairs in the previous study). Possible reasons for these results are discussed, and potential applications for the results, and for the testing methodology developed, are outlined.
Highlights
Research shows that people tend to associate gustatory and nongustatory information in ways that are often surprising (e.g., O’Mahony, 1983)
There was evidence for our hypothesis that patches consisting of the same two colors, but, with one patch having a particular color as the foreground, while the other patch had that color as the border would not necessarily have the same pattern of taste associations
The results of the two experiments reported in the present study provide an interesting contrast with those reported recently by Woods and Spence (2016)
Summary
Research shows that people tend to associate gustatory and nongustatory information in ways that are often surprising (e.g., O’Mahony, 1983). Match a flavor with a color when they belong to the same object, for example, the aroma or flavor of cucumber with the color green (Garber, Hyatt, & Starr, 2000; Stillman, 1993; Velasco et al, 2015) and match some more abstract dimensions of sensory information such as basic tastes with color cues (Koch & Koch, 2003; Spence et al, 2015) These matchings, what are often referred to as crossmodal correspondences, refer to the surprising associations that people share between sensory features, attributes, or dimensions of experience in different senses (see Marks, 1978; Parise, 2016; Spence, 2011, 2012, for reviews). The color pink may prompt the concept of candyfloss, and it may be this association rather than the color itself that is thought of as sweet (not all of the authors though believe that correspondences are necessarily grounded in specific experiences of environmental objects that possess both features)
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