Waiter, my salad is the wrong shade of green
Over at Interesting Thing of the Day there’s an interesting article on how experience in one modality can affect experience in another modality. It’s given me some insight on why they score “plating” so highly on the TV show, Iron Chef.
Color can even fool our taste buds into perceiving taste differences where none exist. This point was illustrated by a recent study that appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue.” By changing both the sweetness and the color of orange juice in various increments, researchers found that test subjects ascribed a greater difference in taste between juices of different colors than they did between juices with unequal levels of sweetness.
I actually liked Crystal Pepsi. I thought it tasted lighter, not as sweet… and it didn’t bother my stomach the way most colas do. Now I have to wonder.
More detail is at The Influence of Color on Taste Perception.