We report two naturalistic citizen science experiments designed to highlight the influence of the texture of plateware on people's rating of the mouthfeel and taste of food (specifically, biscuits) sampled from that plateware. In the first experiment, participants tasted a biscuit from a pair of plates, one having a rough and the other a smooth finish. In the second experiment, participants tasted biscuits and jelly babies. Participants rated the mouthfeel and taste of the two foodstuffs. The results both confirm and extend previous findings suggesting that haptically and visually perceived texture can influence both oral-somatosensory judgments of texture as well as, in this case, the reported taste or flavour of the food itself. The crossmodal effects reported here are explained in terms of the notion of sensation transference. These results have potentially important implications for everything from the design of the tactile aspects of packaging through to the design of service-ware in the setting of the restaurant.

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Fear is elicited by imminent threat and leads to phasic fear responses with selective attention, whereas anxiety is characterized by a sustained state of heightened vigilance due to uncertain danger. In the present study, we investigated attention mechanisms in fear and anxiety by adapting the NPU-threat test to measure steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs). We investigated ssVEPs across no aversive events (N), predictable aversive events (P), and unpredictable aversive events (U), signaled by four-object arrays (30s). In addition, central cues were presented during all conditions but predictably signaled imminent threat only during the P condition. Importantly, cues and context events were flickered at different frequencies (15Hz vs. 20Hz) in order to disentangle respective electrocortical responses. The onset of the context elicited larger electrocortical responses for U compared to P context. Conversely, P cues elicited larger electrocortical responses compared to N cues. Interestingly, during the presence of the P cue, visuocortical processing of the concurrent context was also enhanced. The results support the notion of enhanced initial hypervigilance to unpredictable compared to predictable threat contexts, while predictable cues show electrocortical enhancement of the cues themselves but additionally a boost of context processing.

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