title: A confusion matrix for the study of taste perception.
abstract: Taste stimulus identification was studied in order to more thoroughly examine human taste perception. Ten replicates of an array of 10 taste stimuli--NaCl, KCl, Na glutamate, quinine. HCl, citric acid, sucrose, aspartame, and NaCl-sucrose, acid-sucrose, and quinine-sucrose mixtures--were presented to normal subjects for identification from a list of corresponding stimulus names. Because perceptually similar substances are confused in identification tasks, the result was a taste confusion matrix. Consistency of identification for the 10 stimuli (T10) and for each stimulus pair (T2) was quantified with measures derived from information theory. Forty-two untrained subjects made an average of 57.4% correct identifications. An average T10 of 2.25 of the maximum 3.32 bits and an average T2 of 0.84 of a maximum 1.0 bit of information were transmitted. In a second experiment, 40 trained subjects performed better than 20 untrained subjects. The results suggested that the identification procedure may best be used to assess taste function following 1-2 training replicates. The patterns of taste confusion indicate that the 10 stimuli resemble one another to varying extents, yet each can be considered perceptually unique.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostructure and Function, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington 06030-3705, USA. thetting@neuron.uchc.edu
authors.forename: T P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Hettinger
authors.forename: J F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Gent
authors.forename: L E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Marks
authors.forename: M E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Frank
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011601:Psychophysics; D013649:Taste; D013652:Taste Threshold