ified. By contrast, when a greater number of shapes (15 in the present study) were presented, the sharp vs. round difference might be less salient. That is, when being compared to a lot regular shapes such as a square, rectangle, and so on, the blob and asymmetric star shapes might be classed into one category of irregular shapes. We are currently conducting research to try to understand this issue.
In conclusion, the findings of the present study highlight a number of interesting crossmodal correspondences between four of the tastes (bitter, salty, sour, and sweet) and certain visual features (colors, shapes, and textures). These findings also reveal some cross-cultural similarities and dissimilarities in these correspondences, thus implying the different natures of the different correspondences. That is, some crossmodal correspondences may be more subject to people’s cultural background than others. Future research is needed to test the underlying neural mechanism of the crossmodal correspondences (also see Seo et al., 2010; Chan et al., 2014).
Each of the listing co-authors made the following contributions to the paper: Charles Spence, Andy T. Woods, Kirsten J. McKenzie, and Xiaoang Wan co-developed the idea for the study and collaboratively designed the study. Andy T. Woods, Xiaoang Wan, and Kirsten J. McKenzie collected the data. Jasper J. F. van den Bosch conducted the data analysis. Jasper J. F. van den Bosch, Andy T. Woods, Xiaoang Wan, Carlos Velasco, and Charles Spence conducted the interpretation of the data. Xiaoang Wan, Charles Spence, Andy T. Woods, Carlos Velasco, and Jasper J. F. van den Bosch drafted the manuscript. All of the authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71472106) awarded to Xiaoang Wan, and the Rethinking the Senses grant from the AHRC (UK) awarded to Charles Spence (AH/L007053/1). Jasper J. F. van den Bosch is supported by the Ready Mind Project Comments concerning this paper should be sent to Dr. Xiaoang Wan at email@example.com
- ^ Note, though, that texture is not inherently or necessarily visual in nature; it can also be experienced by touching a surface or object. Yet, two types of textures were explored as visual features in the present study.
- ^ These five tastes terms are often referred to as the “basic tastes,” though it should be noted that there is an ongoing debate as to whether there are basic tastes or not and, if so, how they should be defined (e.g., Delwiche, 1996; Erickson, 2008).
- ^ The remaining 24 participants came from 13 other countries, including Ireland, Japan, Oman, Romania, Uruguay, Vietnam, Trinidad and Tobago, Sri Lanka, UK, Iran, France, Pakistan, and Korea. Their data were not included in the data analyses of this paper due to the small sample size in each cultural group.
- ^ The English website for the word umami is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami, and the Chinese version is http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%AE%AE%E5%91%B3
- ^ Note that in this and all following tests where multiple comparisons were conducted, Bonferroni’s correction was used and p values are only reported after such correction.
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