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 different from each other. In other words, it is difficult to explain these cross-cultural differences simply in terms of the differentiation between Eastern and Western countries. In addition to cultural difference, differences in other domains, such as geographic locations, climates, agriculture, may also play an important role in the formation of crossmodal associations between taste/flavors and visual features (see also Wan et al., 2014, 2015). That being said, it should also be borne in mind that other factors, such as age, gender, travel (which likely means more exposure other cultures), cooking experience, might also vary between participants within a group or cross groups (see also Levitan et al., 2014). It is also possible that, when seeing a taste term, different people might imagine different foods/flavors due to the specific associations they have to each specific taste (see also Majid and Burenhult, 2014). For example, when seeing the word bitter, the Chinese might think of strong tea or traditional Chinese medicine, whereas people from the USA might think of black coffee. The formation of crossmodal associations with taste might be very complicated, and vary from culture to culture, individual to individual.
It should also be noted that two of the shapes in the present study (i.e., named as the “blob” and “asymmetric star”) were very similar to (if not identical to) the round and sharp shapes which were used to elicit the Bouba–Kiki effect (Köhler, 1929; Marks, 1978; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Bremner et al., 2013). Previous studies have revealed some cross-cultural difference in the crossmodal correspondences between sharp/round shapes and certain tastes/flavors, such as the carbonation of the water (Gallace et al., 2011; Ngo et al., 2012; Bremner et al., 2013) and the bitterness of chocolate (Ngo et al., 2011; Bremner et al., 2013). However, we did not find significant effects of culture on the taste-patterns for these two shapes, which is inconsistent with the findings of previous studies. Mart