Cross-cultural differences in crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and visual features

Wan (2014) · Read the paper

Wan, Woods, van den Bosch, McKenzie, Velasco and Spence ran a cross-cultural study of how people link visual features to the five basic tastes. The features were 11 colours, 15 shapes and 2 textures, shown online to 452 participants from four countries, who chose the best-matching taste term for each image and rated their confidence. Several colours and shapes were consistently associated with particular tastes across the four groups, and the colour white and the textures were also linked with salty. The patterns differed considerably between countries and the differences did not simply track whether a country is Eastern or Western. The authors conclude that cultural background shapes crossmodal correspondences. Journal of record: Frontiers in Psychology 5, article 1365, 2014.

Wan, Woods, van den Bosch, McKenzie, Velasco and Spence ran a cross-cultural study of how people link visual features to the five basic tastes. The features were 11 colours, 15 shapes and 2 textures, shown online to 452 participants from four countries, who chose the best-matching taste term for each image and rated their confidence. Several colours and shapes were consistently associated with particular tastes across the four groups, and the colour white and the textures were also linked with salty. The patterns differed considerably between countries and the differences did not simply track whether a country is Eastern or Western. The authors conclude that cultural background shapes crossmodal correspondences. Journal of record: Frontiers in Psychology 5, article 1365, 2014.

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Wan, X., Woods, A. T., van den Bosch, J. J. F., McKenzie, K. J., Velasco, C., & Spence, C. (2014). Cross-cultural differences in crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and visual features. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1365. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01365 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01365