Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document.When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policyWhile the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

People tend to associate abstract visual features with basic taste qualities. This narrative historical review critically evaluates the literature on these associations, often referred to as crossmodal correspondences, between basic tastes and visual design features such as color hue and shape curvilinearity. The patterns, discrepancies, and evolution in the development of the research are highlighted while the mappings that have been reported to date are summarized. The review also reflects on issues of cross-cultural validity and deviations in the matching patterns that are observed when correspondences are assessed with actual tastants versus with verbal stimuli. The various theories that have been proposed to account for different classes of crossmodal correspondence are discussed, among which the statistical and affective (or emotional-mediation) accounts currently appear most promising. Several critical research questions for the future are presented to address the gaps that have been identified in the literature and help validate the popular theories on the origin and operations of visual-taste correspondences.

Children are frequently victims and witnesses of crime. In the witness identification literature, children are deemed to have unreliable memories. Yet, in developmental research, even young children display appropriate metacognitive cues that reflect their accuracy. To address these contradictory findings, we asked children in young- (4–6 years), middle- (7–9 years), and late- (10–17 years) childhood (N = 2,205) to watch a person in a video, and then identify that person from a police lineup. We asked children to provide a confidence rating for their identification decision (a direct metacognitive cue), and used an interactive lineup—in which the lineup faces can be rotated and viewed from different angles—to analyze children’s viewing behavior (an indirect metacognitive cue). According to calibration statistics that have traditionally been calculated in the witness literature, confidence was only informative about accuracy in late-childhood. Confidence-Accuracy Characteristic analysis, however, suggested that confidence and accuracy were related and high-confidence suspect identifications were highly accurate in middle- and late- childhood. Moreover, in all age groups, viewing behavior on the interactive lineup differed in children who made correct compared to incorrect suspect identifications. Our research suggests that the fundamental architecture of metacognition that has previously been evidenced in the developmental literature on relatively simple tasks, also underlies performance on complex tasks like an identification from a lineup. Moreover, our findings are practically important for legal professionals interpreting child memory evidence: Namely, identifications made by children can be reliable when appropriate metacognitive cues are used to assess accuracy.