"Turn Up the Taste": Assessing the Role of Taste Intensity and Emotion in Mediating Crossmodal Correspondences between Basic Tastes and Pitch.

ABSTRACT: People intuitively match basic tastes to sounds of different pitches, and the matches that they make tend to be consistent across individuals. It is, though, not altogether clear what governs such crossmodal mappings between taste and auditory pitch. Here, we assess whether variations in taste intensity influence the matching of taste to pitch as well as the role of emotion in mediating such crossmodal correspondences. Participants were presented with 5 basic tastants at 3 concentrations. In Experiment 1, the participants rated the tastants in terms of their emotional arousal and valence/pleasantness, and selected a musical note (from 19 possible pitches ranging from C2 to C8) and loudness that best matched each tastant. In Experiment 2, the participants made emotion ratings and note match

SUBMITTER: Wang QJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4840871 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature