ite, and yellow), five of the shapes (asymmetrical star, drop, heart, moon, and star), and one of the textures (smooth). The effects of country on the taste-patterns for these stimuli are demonstrated in Figure 5.
FIGURE 5. The taste-patterns for stimuli with which cross-cultural differences were found. Note that the percentage of the bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami taste terms chosen for the visual stimuli are represented by the fill-in colors black, white, green, pink, and blue, respectively.
Representational dissimilarity matrices were also calculated as a function of the culture (see Figure 6). First, the blue color displays similar taste-patterns as the color white for the Malaysian participants. The Chinese and Indian groups also showed the same trends; whereas participants from the USA did not. Second, the Indian participants exhibited similar taste-patterns for the colors green, orange, pink, purple, red, and yellow; whereas the Chinese group might further divide these colors into two sub-groups, each one having similar taste taste-patterns, including (1) green, orange, and purple, and (2) red, yellow, and pink. By contrast, the participants from Malaysia and the USA did not show any such pattern of results. By contrast, some cross-cultural similarities can be found in the shape-taste associations across the four cultural groups. That is, they all had a sub-group of shapes with similar taste-patterns, including the square, rectangle, and cross shapes. On the other hand, the Indian, Malaysian, and USA groups all had a sub-group of star, moon, and heart with similar taste-patterns, whereas the Chinese group did not clearly show such a pattern. As for the asymmetrical star shape, drop shape, and rough shape, all the four groups showed different patterns from each other.
FIGURE 6. The RDMs for color-shape-texture-taste associations for each group of participants. The color of each cell stands for the dissimilarity between the taste-associated patterns of the objects in the respective row and column, with warm colors (more toward the red) denoting high dissimilarity and cold colors (more toward blue) denoting high similarity. That is, the warmer the color of a cell, the more dissimilar the two stimuli are in terms of how they were associated with the tastes. Therefore, the diagonal of each matrix is colored blue to represent the perfect similarity of each stimulus’ taste-pattern with itself.
These RDMs also allowed us to examine whether any color, shape, and/or texture were associated with the same taste(s). Interestingly, the texture (smooth, rough) has similar taste-patterns with the white color for the participants from India, Malaysia, and the USA, but not for the Chinese participants. What is more, a sub-group of colors (green, purple, orange, red, yellow, and pink) and a sub-group of shapes (star, moon, and hear) had similar taste-patterns for the Indian group, whereas the USA and Malaysian groups also both showed this pattern with the color pink and purple (and only pink for the Chinese group).
Last but by no means least, we combined the data from all the groups, and calculated a cross-cultural RDM (see Figure 7). Interestingly, this RDM shows that all the countries are approximately equally dissimilar from, or similar to, one another. Figure 8 also shows each group’s ratings of how confident they were that other people would choose the same taste term for each visual stimulus as they had. Across the four groups of participants, the percentages of those choosing the answers very confident, confident, uncertain, not confident, and very unconfident are 12, 48, 31, 7, and 2%, respectively.
FIGURE 7. The cross-cultural RDM. The color of each cell stands for the dissimilarity between the taste-associated patterns of the culture groups in the respective row and column, with warm colors denoting high dissimilarity and cold colors denoting low dissimilarity. The diagonal of this matrix is still colored blue because of the perfect similarity of each group’s taste-pattern with itself.
FIGURE 8. Confidence ratings f