Original Research ARTICLE
Cross-cultural differences in crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and visual features
- 1Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
- 2Xperiment, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 3Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
- 4School of Psychology, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Semenyih, Malaysia
- 5Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
We report a cross-cultural study designed to investigate crossmodal correspondences between a variety of visual features (11 colors, 15 shapes, and 2 textures) and the five basic taste terms (bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami). A total of 452 participants from China, India, Malaysia, and the USA viewed color patches, shapes, and textures online and had to choose the taste term that best matched the image and then rate their confidence in their choice. Across the four groups of participants, the results revealed a number of crossmodal correspondences between certain colors/shapes and bitter, sour, and sweet tastes. Crossmodal correspondences were also documented between the color white and smooth/rough textures on the one hand and the salt taste on the other. Cross-cultural differences were observed in the correspondences between certain colors, shapes, and one of the textures and the taste terms. The taste-patterns shown by the participants from the four countries tested in the present study are quite different from one another, and these differences cannot easily be attributed merely to whether a country is Eastern or Western. These findings therefore highlight the impact of cultural background on crossmodal correspondences. As such, they raise a number of interesting questions regarding the neural mechanisms underlying crossmodal correspondences.
‘Crossmodal correspondence’ is one of the terms that have been used to describe the tendency that people have to associate certain features, or stimuli, across the senses (Spence, 2011; Spence and Deroy, 2013). For example, one of the best known correspondences between sound and shape is the Bouba–Kiki effect. People tend to associate the words “Bouba” (soft sound) and “Kiki” (sharp sound) with rounded and angular shapes, respectively (Köhler, 1929; Marks, 1978; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Bremner et al., 2013). Even though the majority of the research on crossmodal correspondences that has been conducted to date has focused on correspondences between audition and vision (see Parise and Spence, 2013, for a review), there is also a growing interest in examining and documenting other crossmodal correspondences across different senses (see Spence and Deroy, 2014, for a review).
Spence (2011) distinguished between three different types of crossmodal correspondences, including, (1) structural correspondences which are thought to result from commonalities in the way in which different kinds of sensory information are coded neurally, (2) statistical correspondences, which pick-up on the repeated co-exposure of pairs of stimuli or correlated dimensions of experience in daily life, and (3) the linguistic correspondences that are rooted in language. Both statistical and linguistic correspondences may depend on people’s cultural background and on context, thus leading to possible cross-cultural differences. What is more, a fourth type of crossmodal correspondence might be based on an individual’s affective response to stimuli that they want to pair together (Deroy et al., 2013; Palmer et al., 2013). Yet, it should be noted that the different types of correspondences are not mutually exclusive. For example, people may learn the statistical regularities and develop semantic and/or structural correspondences over the short or long term (e.g., Ernst, 2007; Parise and Spence, 2013).
Previous studies have revealed that people match basic tastes with a host of other non-gustatory stimuli/dimensions, such as colors (see Spence et al., 2010, for a review), and shap