Visual influence of shapes and semantic familiarity on human sweet sensitivity

Liang, Pei; Roy, Soumyajit; Chen, Meng‐Ling; Zhang, Genhua

doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2013.07.001

Cited by 68 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Most prominent amongst these correspondences is the association between round shapes and sweetness [2][3][4]. Round shapes have even been shown to increase participants' sensitivity for sweetness at threshold levels, compared to angular shapes [5,6]. In the realm of chocolate, people from Western cultures tend to associate chocolate with a higher cacao content (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the effect of shape on the evaluation of expected and actual chocolate flavour

Wang

Carvalho

Persoone³

et al. 2017

Flavour

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Background: Shape can play an important role in our perception of food. In this study, the consequences of crossmodal correspondences between shape and taste on the expected and actual experience of eating chocolate were evaluated. Participants were given two identical dark chocolates differing only in terms of their shape (round or angular) and then rated their expectations of sweetness, bitterness, creaminess and liking. Subsequently, they rated their experience of those attributes on tasting the chocolates. Repeated-measures multivariate analyses (RM-MANOVA) of variance were conducted to assess the role of chocolate shape and cacao content on expected and post-taste chocolate ratings. In addition, we assessed the differences between expected and post-taste ratings for each chocolate shape. Results: The results revealed that the shape of the chocolate significantly influenced expected sweetness, bitterness and creaminess. By contrast, it had no significant effect on post-tasting ratings. The round chocolates were judged to be less sweet, more bitter, less creamy and liked less than expected, whereas the angular chocolates were judged to be slightly more creamy than expected. Conclusions: The theory of assimilation and contrast is outlined as one plausible mechanism behind the differences between expectation and the actual taste experience. Implications for food product design and directions for future research are discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the effect of shape on the evaluation of expected and actual chocolate flavour

Wang

Carvalho

Persoone³

et al. 2017

Flavour

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“…For example, simply adding a tasteless colorant to water can el evate or lower taste thresholds, even when participants were warned that the color is irrelevant information (review in Spence etal., 2010). Taste perception can therefore be easily manipulated by altering either appearance (Wheatley, 1973; see also Liang et al, 2013) or descriptive labels (Crum et al, 2011;Levitan et al, 2008;Yeomans et al, 2008) of foods. More interestingly, the mindset of expectations about foods and their visual presentation activate the gustatory cortices, i.e., the insula/operculum and orbitofrontal cortex, even in the absence of gustatory stimulation (Barros-Locertales et al, 2011;review in Van der Laan et al, 2011).…”

Section: Tastementioning

confidence: 99%

Making Sense of the Chemical Senses

2014

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We review our recent behavioural and imaging studies testing the consequences of congenital blind ness on the chemical senses in comparison with the condition of anosmia. We found that congenitally blind (CB) subjects have increased sensitivity for orthonasal odorants and recmit their visually de prived occipital cortex to process orthonasal olfactory stimuli. In sharp contrast, CB perform less well than sighted controls in taste and retronasal olfaction, i.e. when processing chemicals inside the mouth. Interestingly, CB do not recruit their occipital cortex to process taste stimuli. In contrast to these findings in blindness, congenital anosmia is associated with lower taste and trigeminal sensitiv ity, accompanied by weaker activations within the 'flavour network' upon exposure to such stimuli. We conclude that functional adaptations to congenital anosmia or blindness are quite distinct, such that CB can train their exteroceptive chemical senses and recruit normally visual cortical areas to process chemical information from the surrounding environment.

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“…Moreover, the results also suggest that tastes and shapes share a 222 semantic space or a set of implicit meanings, which is initially characterized by two main 223 components. Indeed, a possibility is that these components reflect the two elements identified 224 between taste words and shapes would produce congruence effects over-and-above those 231 already reported with tastes per se (Liang et al, 2013), that is, by using linguistic taste 232 stimuli. For this purpose, we designed a task in which a larger sample of participants (in order 233 to compensate for potential hardware-related differences across participants and fewer trials, 234 e.g., Woods et al, 2015) were given congruent or incongruent instructions about the mapping 235 between taste words and shapes and were later asked to respond to shapes or taste words with 236 taste words and shapes, respectively.…”

Section: Results and Discussion 178mentioning

confidence: 96%

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Supplemental Information 1: Raw Data - Experiment 1

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Visual influence of shapes and semantic familiarity on human sweet sensitivity

Cited by 68 publications

References 20 publications

Assessing the effect of shape on the evaluation of expected and actual chocolate flavour

Assessing the effect of shape on the evaluation of expected and actual chocolate flavour

Making Sense of the Chemical Senses

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