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The Effects of Color Information on the Perception of Chocolate Taste

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2019, v.31 no.2, pp.191-197
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2019.31.2.010




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Abstract

The expression ‘what looks good tastes good’ implies a close relationship between taste and visual information. In particular, color information has been considered to significantly influence taste perception. The current study explored the effects of color information on the taste perception of chocolate, a representative favorite food. A preliminary experiment exploring color-taste associations found that yellow is strongly associated with sour tastes and green with bitter tastes. These colors were selected as stimuli in the main experiment. Two batches of white chocolate were colored with flavorless yellow and green food coloring, respectively, while a third batch was left uncolored as a control stimuli. This process yielded three colors of chocolate with the same taste. After eating one randomly assigned piece of chocolate of the three colors, each participant was asked to rate its sweet, sour, and bitter characteristics on a seven-point scale. The study found that the yellow chocolate scored a significantly higher sour rating than chocolates with the other colors. These results show that expectations based on color information can influence the taste perception of chocolate.

keywords
색상 정보, 초콜릿, 맛 지각, 감각통합적 효과, color information, chocolate, taste perception, cross-modal effect

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The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology