e, red, and yellow). They had their participants rate the degree at which a given color is related to a certain color on the 10-point scale, with higher scores indicating positive associations and lower scores indicating negative associations. As summarized in Table 1, the results revealed crossmodal associations between red/orange and sweet, green/yellow and sour, as well as white and salty.
Despite Tomasik-Krótki and Strojny’s (2008) study not addressing cross-cultural differences, it should be noted that their participants came from more than a dozen countries and regions from all over the world. By contrast, all of the participants in O’Mahony’s (1983) as well as Koch and Koch’s (2003) studies were students of major universities in the USA (mostly likely the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, namely WEIRD; Henrich et al., 2010). Therefore, it is possible that the discrepancy between the results of the three studies might be due to the difference in the cultural background of the participants who were tested.
In the present study, we attempted to address these important questions by testing participants from mainland China, India, Malaysia, and the USA. These particular countries were chosen for the following reasons: The USA is one of the most often mentioned countries when it comes to representing “Western culture” in the field of Cultural Psychology, not to mention standard psychological research (Henrich et al., 2010). By contrast, China, India, and Malaysia are all Asian countries, but they exhibit some dramatic differences in terms of their food culture (e.g., Kittler and Sucher, 2007) which might lead to differences in terms of crossmodal associations between visual attributes and taste/flavor.
Materials and Methods
A total of 452 participants took part in this study. 428 of them came from four separate populations, including 144 from mainland China (19.8 ± 1.5 years, ranging from 18 to 30 years; 52 females), 113 from India (31.4 ± 9.4 years, ranging from 19 to 66 years; 46 females), 117 from the USA (30.3 ± 8.4 years, ranging from 18 to 68 years; 31 females), and 54 from Malaysia (20.9 ± 4.0 years, ranging from 17 to 36 years; 45 females)3. This study was reviewed and approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee of the University of Oxford. All of the participants provided informed consent prior to taking part in the study. The Malaysian participants were recruited via email, which contained a link to the online experiment. The North American and Indian participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and took part in this study in exchange for a payment of 0.80 US dollars. Through a feature of Mechanical Turk, we specified that only people registered as living in America or India could take part in the study. The Chinese participants were undergraduate students from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and they received credit to fulfill the requirement of an introductory psychology course.
This study was conducted online using Adobe Flash-based Xperiment software (www.xperiment.mobi downloaded on 15/05/13). The participants from India, Malaysia, and the USA completed the task in English, whereas the participants from China did so in Chinese. The text descriptors and images used as stimuli were presented against a gray background (RGB: 217, 217, 217), and each stimulus was tightly fit within a 90 × 90 pixel box. Text descriptors of bitter, salty, sour, umami, and sweet were used for the five taste terms, all of which were in the Times New Roman font size 22.
Three types of images were used as the central targets, including the images of shapes, color patches (all presented as a square shape), and texture patches (all in the square shape). Specifically, 11 different color patches were used, including black (RGB: 0, 0, 0), blue (RGB: 0, 0, 255), brown (RGB: 165, 42, 42), green (RGB: 0, 255, 0), gray (RGB: 128, 128, 128), orange (RGB: 255, 165, 0), pink (RGB: 255, 192, 203), purple (RGB: 128, 0, 128), red (RGB: 255, 0, 0), white (RGB: 255, 255, 255), and yellow (RG