A sweet sound? Food names reveal implicit associations between taste and pitch.
Sounds (high- and low-pitched) have been shown to be implicitly associated with basic tastes (sour and bitter-see Crisinel and Spence, 2009 Neuroscience Letters 464 39-42). In the present study, a version of the implicit association test was used to assess the strength of the association between high-pitched sounds and names of sweet-tasting foodstuffs, and between low-pitched sounds and names of salty-tasting foodstuffs (experiment 1). A similar task, the go/no-go association task was then used to evaluate the relative strengths of these associations (experiment 2). Analysis of the sensitivity of participants' responses suggested that both sour- and sweet-tasting (names of) food items were associated with high-pitched sounds. This result highlights the existence of robust cross-modal associations between certain sounds and basic tastes.
Crisinel
Anne-Sylvie
AS
Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. anne-sylvie.crisinel@psy.ox.ac.uk
Spence
Charles
C
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001244:Association; D002182:Candy; D005260:Female; D005502:Food; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D017673:Sodium Chloride, Dietary; D013649:Taste; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D055815:Young Adult
D017673:Sodium Chloride, Dietary