study of taste perception

Abstract

Taste stimulus identification was studied in order to more thoroughly examine human taste perception. Ten replicates of an array of 10 taste stimuli-NaCI, KCI, Na glutamate, quinine.HCI, citric acid, sucrose, aspartame, and NaCI~sucrose, acid-sucrose, and quinine-sucrose mixtures-were presented to normal subjects for identification from a list of corresponding stimulus names. Because perceptually similar substances are confused in identification tasks, the result was a taste confusion matrix.Consistency of identification for the 10 stimuli (T IO ) and for each stimulus pair (T z ) was quantified with measures derived from information theory. Forty-two untrained subjects made an average of 57.4% correct identifications. An average T IO of 2.25 of the maximum 3.32 bits and an average T z of 0.84 of a maximum 1.0 bit of information were transmitted. In a second experiment, 40 trained subjects performed better than 20 untrained subjects. The results suggested that the identification procedure may best be used to assess taste function following 1-2 training replicates. The patterns of taste confusion indicate that the 10 stimuli resemble one another to varying extents, yet each can be considered perceptually unique.The performance of human subjects in taste identification tests is often restricted to a few stimuli-such as sucrose, sodium chloride, citric acid, and quinine-that are representative of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter qualities (M. E. Frank, Hettinger, & Clive, 1995). The limitation of the number of stimuli and qualities raises the question of whether such taste tests adequately examine the full range of taste sensation and discriminability (McBurney & Gent, 1979;Schiffman & Erickson, 1993). Consequently, we sought to develop a method by which to characterize taste quality perception more fully, by using 10 stimuli and analyzing patterns of identification in a rigorous way through information theory. Wright (1987) described a method for producing what he termed an odorant confusion matrix to assess the di-

A Dissociation Between Recognition and Hedonic Value in Caloric and Non-caloric Carbonated Soft Drinks

“…Participants showed a low level of discrimination between sugar and artificial sweeteners, with only a 57% overall accuracy. Such a poor performance is consistent with previous evidence of confusion between solutions with similar taste in discrimination tasks ( Hettinger et al, 1999 ). Interestingly, participants were significantly less accurate in detecting sugar than in detecting artificial sweeteners.…”

“…Such preference is likely to be associated with striatal dopamine release and the consequent rewarding effect after consuming sugar, which are absent in non-caloric sweeteners ( Frank et al, 2008 ; Ren et al, 2010 ; Smeets et al, 2011 ). Also, participants rated SSBs as sweeter than ASBs, which is consistent with previous findings ( Hettinger et al, 1999 , but see Thai et al, 2011 for contrasting results).…”

“…Most of the previous studies that tested perceptual discrimination of sugar from non-caloric sweeteners used solutions that had been prepared to fit specific experimental needs (see Schiffman and Gatlin, 1993 for a review). With such methods, Hettinger et al (1999) tested how well people could recognize familiar tastes without knowledge of what they were tasting. The results indicated that sucrose was correctly labeled as sugar in 66% of the cases, but was mislabeled as aspartame in about 30% of the trials.…”

“…The results indicated that sucrose was correctly labeled as sugar in 66% of the cases, but was mislabeled as aspartame in about 30% of the trials. Aspartame was labeled as artificial sweetener 41% of the time and confused with sugar 50% of the time ( Hettinger et al, 1999 ). The methodological approach of using solutions specifically prepared for the experiment has the advantage of increasing control, but reduces the applicability of results to the actual habits of soft drink consumers.…”

Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Between Colours and Tastes

“…(2015a ) found that participants collectively named an average of 53 objects for each odour in their study (exceeding the number of participants, 32, who were tested), thus demonstrating that people tend to generate multiple possible sources objects when presented with an odour. By contrast, with the four main basic tastes, there is far less ambiguity, excepting the occasional confusion between sour and bitter ( Doty et al., 2017 ; Hettinger et al., 1999 ; O’Mahony et al., 1979). Of course, as soon as one goes beyond the basic four, many of us soon start to struggle.…”