Localizing taste and products with characteristic tastes in 2D space

Abstract

Research has revealed just how extensively people associate seemingly-unrelated dimensions of perceptual experience (Spence, 2011). Relevant to the present study, people have been shown to associate information between perceptual features or dimensions and locations in ways that are non-random (Marks, 1978). Here, across two experiments, we evaluated whether people associate basic tastes and products with characteristic taste properties (sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) with a distinctive location in 2D space (expressed as a circle). The results of Experiment 1 (n = 62, 22 females, M birth year = 1975) revealed that participants position the word “sweet” higher in space, relative to the word “bitter”. Experiment 2 (n = 80, 38 females, M age = 18.54 years) replicated these findings while also showing that people position products that are typically sweet (cupcake and honey) or bitter (beer and coffee) differently in 2D space. Overall, sweet-tasting products were assigned higher spatial locations than the bitter-tasting products (see Figure 1 for a visual summary of the results). These results demonstrate that sweet and bitter tastes are differentially located in vertical (but not horizontal) space. The compatibility between tastes and locations in 2D space reflects some level of organization taking place within our conceptual system. The potential implications of these findings for both our understanding of crossmodal correspondences, as well for taste evaluation, and product placement will be discussed