The semantic basis of taste-shape associations

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1 Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2 Imagineering Institute, Iskandar, Malaysia
3 Xperiment, Surrey, UK
4 Sensory Information Processing, John B. Pierce Laboratory, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
5 School of Public Health and Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
6 School of Mathematics, Engineering, and Computer Science, City University, London, United Kingdom
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1366v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
semantic differentiation, shapes, crossmodal correspondences, tastes
Copyright
© 2015 Velasco et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Velasco C, Woods AT, Marks LE, Cheok AD, Spence C. 2015. The semantic basis of taste-shape associations. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1366v1

Abstract

Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assessed the extent to which matching taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experiment 1, we used semantic differentiation to assess the semantic space of both taste words and shapes. The results suggest a common semantic space containing two principal components (seemingly potency and evaluation) and two principal clusters, one including round shapes and the taste word “sweet”, and the other including angular shapes and the taste words “salty”, “sour”, and “bitter”. The former cluster appears more positively-valenced whilst less potent than the latter. In Experiment 2, two speeded classification tasks assessed whether congruent versus incongruent mappings of stimuli and responses (e.g., sweet with round versus sweet with angular) would influence participants’ speed of responding, both to shapes and to taste words. The results revealed an overall effect of congruence that was driven mostly when the participants had to classify shapes with taste words as responses. These results are consistent with previous evidence suggesting a close relation (or crossmodal correspondence) between tastes and shape curvature that may derive from common semantic coding, perhaps along the sensory-discriminative and hedonic dimensions.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

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