nts as opposed to text-descriptors would seem a logical way to avoid this issue in future research. However, it is also possible that some participants would likely still be unfamiliar with the umami taste even when having it in mouth. Importantly, testing with real tastants might be very difficult to do with a large sample of participants from different populations as in the present study. On the other hand, it remains unclear whether the forced choices that the participants made in the present study were the same as the spontaneous and/or automatic responses that they might have made if not given the various options to choose between. It is also possible that the crossmodal associations observed with the matching task is a by-product of the explicit forced choice task (also see Deroy and Valentin, 2011; Velasco et al., submitted), if the participants only chose the least dissonant among unassociated taste words. A future avenue of research might be to use more implicit measures such as the implicit association task (IAT), speeded classification task, and go/no go task.
Comparing to previous studies which either averaged across culture (Tomasik-Krótki and Strojny, 2008) or only tested so-called WEIRD’s (O’Mahony, 1983; Koch and Koch, 2003), our results also revealed some interesting cross-cultural differences in terms of the crossmodal associations that exist between taste and visual features, including eight colors (blue, green, gray, orange, purple, red, white, and yellow), five shapes (asymmetrical star, drop, heart, moon, and star), and one texture (smooth). Compared to the shape-taste associations, it would appear that we have found less color–taste associations that are common across the various cultures (4 out of 11 colors vs. 7 out of 15 shapes), but more cross-cultural differences in the color-taste associations (8 out of 11 colors vs. 5 out of 15 shapes). Peoples’ sensation, perception, and experience of taste/flavor are certainly influenced by their food preferences and consumption, around the latter of which there are obviously dramatic cross-cultural differences (e.g., Kittler and Sucher, 2007). On the other hand, colors convey different esthetic values and meanings in different contexts (Aslam, 2006), and people from different cultures might have very different expectations on seeing the same colored foods (e.g., Shankar et al., 2010; Wan et al., 2014, 2015). Therefore, cross-cultural differences are likely to occur in visual feature-taste/flavor associations, especially in terms of color-taste/flavor associations.
According to the theoretical framework of the categorization of crossmodal correspondences (Spence, 2011), some might be attributable to the same or similar neural coding (i.e., structural correspondences), whereas others might be much more dependent on people’s prior life experience and language, and therefore be expected to potentially vary as a function of culture (i.e., statistical and linguistic correspondences). Therefore, the cross-cultural findings reported here allow us to discuss the nature of crossmodal correspondences in more depth. For example, some strong crossmodal correspondences occur across the four groups, such as the color black/cross shape/ellipse shape with the bitter taste, and pink color/cloud shape with sweet taste. Such correspondences might be structural in origin, and are possibly based to common neural correlates. Alternatively, however, they may also be statistical in nature in that they pick-up on repeated co-exposure of pairs of stimuli or correlated dimensions that people from different cultures have in common. By contrast, those crossmodal correspondences which vary across cultures might be statistical in nature, picking-up on the co-exposure of pairs of stimuli or correlated dimensions that people from different cultures have but others do not, or linguistic correspondences (see also Majid and Burenhult, 2014).
In terms of the whole picture of color-shape-texture-taste associations, we found the four countries, China, India, Malaysia, and the USA, are quite dif