or each group of participants. When choosing a taste term to match the visual stimuli, the participants were also asked to indicate how confident they were that other people would respond in the same fashion as they had. Note that the percentage of the very unconfident, unconfident, uncertain, confident, and very confident chosen for the answer are represented by the fill-in colors purple, blue, yellow, red, and green, respectively.
The results of the present study revealed a number of intriguing crossmodal associations between the basic tastes and certain visual features across the four groups of participants from different countries, including (1) the fact that a bitter taste was matched with black, the cross, ellipse, rectangle, and square shapes, (2) the salty taste was matched with the color white, and the smooth and rough textures, (3) the sour taste was matched with the color green, and (4) the sweet taste was matched with the color pink, the cloud, heart, and star shapes. By contrast, the results did not show that the umami taste was strongly associated with any color, shape, or texture in any of the groups of participants. Considering that the umami taste was recognized as one of the basic tastes long after the other four were recognized (Kawamura and Kare, 1987; Mouritsen and Styrbaek, 2014), it is difficult to differentiate whether the participants were simply not familiar with this term, were confused with the usage of this term (namely taste confusion, see O’Mahony et al., 1979), or this taste was just not strongly associated with any one of the visual features presented in this study.
It should be noted that language plays an important role in the matching task, and the participants were asked to make a forced choice. Therefore, the nature of the matching task might elicit more linguistic correspondences than other types of correspondences (see Melara and Marks, 1990; Martino and Marks, 2001; for comparisons between linguistic and non-linguistic correspondences). By contrast, testing with real tastants 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 