Relative Taste Intensities of Selected Sugars and Organic Acids a

Category scales were obtained for the sweetness of sucrose, fructose, and glucose, with care being taken to preclude methodological bias. These category scales were then used to predict the outcome of scale-free sweetness matching with the same three sweeteners. The matching concentrations predicted from the category scales were found to agree well with those actually obtained in several sweetness-matching studies.

Section: Comparison With Sweetness-matching Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Category scales of sweetness are consistent with sweetness-matching data

McBride

1983

“…Pangborn (1963) found that in water solutions fructose was rated sweeter than sucrose (on a weight basis), whereas in viscous pear nectar the order was reversed. On the other hand, Skramlik (1926) demonstrated that the intensity of taste was consistently lower in paraffin oil than in water.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of viscosity upon perceived sweetness

Arabie

Moskowitz

1971

Six concentrations of sucrose and six concentrations of sodium saccharin were presented as stimuli to 30 Ss. The concentrations were equally spaced logarithmically, covering a 32: I range for each solute. The 12 aqueous solutions were presented at four levels of viscosity, ranging approximately from I to 10,000 centipoises, with sodium carboxymethylcellulose (cellulose gum) as the thickening agent. Magnitude estimates indicate that perceived sweetness decreases with viscosity. In log-log coordinates the Viscosity-sweetness relation is roughly linear with a negative slope, suggesting that sweetness of both sodium saccharin and sucrose varies as a power function of viscosity, with an exponent between -.20 and -.25.The viscosity of a substance is one of the many variables that appear to affect taste, although few studies have been made of it. Rather, viscosity has been viewed as a "disturbing secondary criterion" in taste studies (Lewis, 1948), and a deus ex machina inserted in the discussion of results by various Es, Crocker (1945) speculated that the viscosity of a solution thickened with gum tragacanth, flaxseed, or other mucilaginous material interferes with the diffusion of sapid substances to the receptor. Several results from taste threshold studies suggest that this interference occurs in the detection task. In one such study, Mackey and Valassi (1956) showed that sucrose, sodium chloride, caffeine, and tartaric acid were easiest to detect in a liquid solution, intermediate in a foam base, and most difficult in a gel medium. In a later experiment, Mackey (1958) found that when methylcellulose, a common thickener, was added to aqueous solutions of caffeine, quinine, and saccharin, the threshold rose, presumably because of the increased viscosity. Stone and Oliver (1966) also reported that for a number of thickening agents the detection threshold for sucrose was higher than when sucrose was dissolved in water alone.Stone and Oliver (1966) also invcstigated the relation between suprathreshoJd taste intensity and viscosity. They showed that sucrose solutions which had been thickened with various types of natural and artificial gums were rated higher in sweetness than sucrose solutions in pure water. In a similar study, 'Current address: Department of Psychology. Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.t Requests for reprints should be mailed to Howard R. Moskowitz, PRL Division, U.S. Army Na tick Laboratories, Natick, Massachusetts 01760. Pangborn (1963) found that in water solutions fructose was rated sweeter than sucrose (on a weight basis), whereas in viscous pear nectar the order was reversed. On the other hand, Skramlik (1926) demonstrated that the intensity of taste was consistently lower in paraffin oil than in water. Thus, there does not appear to be any consensus about the effect of viscosity upon suprathreshold intensity of taste.The present experiment was designed to determine a functional relation between viscosity and perceived sweetness, and differs from most of the studies cited above ...

“…The problem of the interaction between pairs of taste qualities has been dealt with in the series of reports by Pangborn and her associates (Pangborn, 1960(Pangborn, , 1961(Pangborn, , 1962(Pangborn, , 1963(Pangborn, , 1964Pangborn, Ough, & Chrisp, 1964;Pangborn & Trabue, 1964); by Kamenetzky and Pilgrim (1958); and in an entirely different approach by Bekesy (1964). The picture is not simple, and the same may be said of the present results.…”

Section: Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 69%

An application of the τ scale of taste: Interaction among the four qualities of taste

Indow

1969

TAROWINDOW KElO UNIVERSITY, TOKYO,JAPANTHE T SCALE When expressed as functions of concentrations of solutions I/J, representing the four qualities of taste, the set of scales T obtained in the previous study are represented, with sufficient accuracy, by the formulae:The present study concerns the use of the T scale (lndow, 1966) to specify the taste of given test solutions. One purpose is to study the precision with which a test solution is allocated by Ss to a point on the T scale. Another purpose is to explore the usefulness of the T scale in a study of the interactions among taste qualities. Instead of ordinary foodstuffs, aqueous solutions of two solutes, e.g., sucrose and sodium chloride, were used as test solutions, and the taste of these solutions was studied as a function of the concentrations of the constituents.