Exploring the Links between Colours and Tastes/Flavours

Abstract

The colour and other visual appearance properties of food and drink constitute a key factor determining consumer acceptance and choice behaviour. Not only do consumers associate specific colours with particular tastes and flavours, but adding or changing the colour of food and drink can also dramatically affect taste/flavour perception. Surprisingly, even the colour of cups, cutlery, plates, packages, and the colour of the environment itself, have also been shown to influence multisensory flavour perception. The taste/flavour associations that we hold with colour are context-dependent, and are often based on statistical learning (though emotional mediation may also play a role). However, to date, neither the computational principles constraining these ubiquitous crossmodal effects nor the neural mechanisms underpinning the various crossmodal associations (or correspondences) that have been documented between colours and tastes/flavours have yet been established. It is currently unclear to what extent such colour-taste/flavour correspondences ought to be explained in terms of semantic congruency (i.e., statistical learning), and/or emotional mediation. Bayesian causal inference has become an increasingly important tool in helping researchers to understand (and predict) the multisensory interactions between the spatial senses of vision, audition, and touch. However, a network modelling approach may be of value moving forward. As made clear by this review, there are substantial challenges, both theoretical and practical, that will need to be overcome by those wanting to apply computational approaches both to understanding the integration of the chemical senses in the case of multisensory flavour perception, and to understanding the influence of colour thereon.

Impact of Snack Food Packaging Design Characteristics on Consumer Purchase Decisions

“…Different taste sensations are also found to be associated with different colors. Japanese colorist Kojiro Naito has experimentally concluded that sweet taste is associated with yellow, sour with green, bitter with black and salty with cyan (Spence & Levitan, 2022). According to research, children prefer sweet foods.…”

Searching for perceptual similarity within, and between, the (chemical) senses

“…The majority of people will, for example, tend to agree that a red drink, or a red or pink color patch, looks (or is associated with) sweet rather than, say, sour (see Spence et al, 2015 , for a review of the literature on color-taste correspondences; Huisman et al, 2016 ; O’Mahony, 1983 ; Woods & Spence, 2016 ). It is, though, important to note that while consensual responses such as these are often obtained under such forced choice experimental conditions, this does not necessarily mean that the participants in the studies concerned thought that the stimuli that they paired together were perceptually similar to one another (see Spence & Levitan, 2022 , on this point). For example, people’s responses might instead merely reflect an expected, or predictive, relationship (i.e., associative learning), such as, for example, that if I see a red drink then I expect it to taste sweet (cf.…”

Visual communication via the design of food and beverage packaging

“…According toLafontaine et al (2020, p. 244): ' Associative learning is defined as learning about the relationship between two separate stimuli, where the stimuli might range from concrete objects and events to abstract concepts, such as time, location, context, or categories' .5 Here, already, one might start to wonder whether inferred colour-concept relations (seeTham et al, 2020) are as effective in terms of consumer perception/behaviour as the inferred mappings that are presumably often picked-up by the research (seeSpence & Levitan, 2022).…”