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Updated: Jun 13, 2026

Psychophysical Tracking Method to Measure Taste Preferences in Children and Adults
Published on: July 16, 2016
A sweet sound? Food names reveal implicit associations between taste and pitch
Anne-Sylvie Crisinel1, Charles Spence
1Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. anne-sylvie.crisinel@psy.ox.ac.uk
Abstract:
Sounds (high- and low-pitched) have been shown to be implicitly associated with basic tastes (sour and bitter-see Crisinel and Spence, 2009 Neuroscience Letters 464 39-42). In the present study, a version of the implicit association test was used to assess the strength of the association between high-pitched sounds and names of sweet-tasting foodstuffs, and between low-pitched sounds and names of salty-tasting foodstuffs (experiment 1). A similar task, the go/no-go association task was then used to evaluate the relative strengths of these associations (experiment 2). Analysis of the sensitivity of participants' responses suggested that both sour- and sweet-tasting (names of) food items were associated with high-pitched sounds. This result highlights the existence of robust cross-modal associations between certain sounds and basic tastes.
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