Crossmodal correspondences between basic tastes and visual design features: A narrative historical review

Abstract

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.

Olfaction and gustation in blindness: a state of the art of the literature

“…Following this idea, experimental psychologist Charles Spence addressed the topic by questioning whether turning off the lights really make the food and drink taste better in normal sighted subjects, and he showed that diners often found it difficult to distinguish between flavours in the absence of any visual cues [ 45 , 46 ]. In fact, colour-taste and shape-taste crossmodal correspondences according to cultural context are well documented [ 47 ]. Regarding this topic, Weismann and collaborators investigated typical patterns of cortical activity by fMRI studies.…”

An fMRI study of visual geometric shapes processing

“…Plenty of literature has provided evidence that shapes’ curvilinearity (roundedness and angularity) may have consistent cross-modal correspondences with other sensory attributes ( Spence, 2011 ; Spence and Ngo, 2012 ; Ghoshal et al, 2016 ; Lee and Spence, 2022 ). For instance, people associate curved shapes with a sweet taste, quiet or calm sound, vanilla smell, green color, smooth texture, relieved emotion, female gender, and wide-vowel names; while they associate angular shapes with sour taste, loud or dynamic sound, spicy or citrus smell, red color, rough texture, excited or surprise emotion, male gender, and narrow-vowel names ( Blazhenkova and Kumar, 2017 ).…”

“…For instance, people associate curved shapes with a sweet taste, quiet or calm sound, vanilla smell, green color, smooth texture, relieved emotion, female gender, and wide-vowel names; while they associate angular shapes with sour taste, loud or dynamic sound, spicy or citrus smell, red color, rough texture, excited or surprise emotion, male gender, and narrow-vowel names ( Blazhenkova and Kumar, 2017 ). Different hypotheses have been proposed for the cross-modal correspondence effect ( Lee and Spence, 2022 ). One is the statistical account, which means the internalization of the multisensory statistics of the environment.…”

Combining typeface and color to prime specific taste expectations.

“…By using the documented patterns of crossmodal correspondences between vision and taste (such as sweet being associated with pink and red) in product packaging and visual presentation of food and drinks, research shows that specific visual features can alter people’s taste expectations, and sometimes also their taste and flavor experiences (Velasco, Hyndman, & Spence, 2018; Velasco, Michel, et al, 2016; see B. P. Lee & Spence, 2022; Spence et al, 2015).…”

“…By using the documented patterns of crossmodal correspondences between vision and taste (such as sweet being associated with pink and red) in product packaging and visual presentation of food and drinks, research shows that specific visual features can alter people's taste expectations, and sometimes also their taste and flavor experiences (Velasco, Hyndman, & Spence, 2018;Velasco, Michel, et al, 2016; see B. P. Lee & Spence, 2022;Spence et al, 2015). Thus far, visual features such as color hue (Spence, 2019), curvilinearity (Velasco, Woods, et al, 2016), symmetry (Turoman et al, 2018), and other nonverbal visual cues (e.g., visual texture;Barbosa Escobar et al, 2022) have been shown to give rise to specific taste expectations.…”