CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF PERCEIVED TASTES ASSOCIATED TO SOUNDS ON THE PERCEPTION OF FOOD TEXTURES
Authors: Onurcan Arman , Eremenko Yulia , Shestakova Anna , Zinchenko Oksana 
Published: November 2024

The perception of food is probably one of the most multisensory experience in our daily lives. It also significantly affects our food decisions. Recent researches by psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists reveal how the complex multisensory interactions influence the food experiences we all know and love. The involvement of chefs in studies devoted to multisensory food perception made this topic even more interesting and interactive since many chefs who work in fine-dining restaurants are trying the optimize the customers' dining experiences (Spence, 2015). This topic is mainly studied by analyzing the cross-modal perception among different senses such as vision, taste and auditory. So far, it has been found that color-taste interaction may alter our perception of taste such as the sweets that are served on the white-round shaped plates are perceived 15 percent sweeter than the sweets that are served on black-rectangular shaped plates or stale potato chips are perceived even crispier than freshly made potato chips when the high-pitched crunch biting sound is involved (Zampini and Spence 2004). These findings support the importance of multisensory food experiences in our food decisions and this study will examine how we can nudge people into healthier food choices by using multisensory food perception and also by analyzing if different textures of the same ingredients and their cross-modal interactions with the congruent sounds may alter the consumers' liking of the sustainable foods.Multisensory food perception is quite a new topic that emerged in the last 20 years in relation with the 'neurogastronomy' (Shepherd, 2011). This field is closely related to cross-modal perception and synaesthesia. Even though these two topics have been researched for more than 150 years, there are no fundamental studies focused on the cross-modal perception of different senses in relation of different food products. Previous studies have investigated individual differences in multisensory food perception and suggest that individuals' multisensory food perception significantly differ genetically and culturally (Spence,2015). Several studies have also suggested that taste-sound or taste-color congruency may lead to cut down on sugar and salt consumption since the increased intensity of the taste match among different senses may provide less need of sugar or salt for any food product (Spence,2015 ; Piqueras-Fiszman et al., 2012). Considering these previous results, it is possible to hypothesize that the multisensory approach to food perception can be used to help nudging consumers towards healthier food decisions (Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman, 2014; Marteau et al., 2012). We plan to investigate the cross-modal perception between texture, taste and sound by conducting a behavioural experiment where the participants’ texture, taste and sound congruency will be measured to analyse if the multisensory food congruency may influence consumers’ food decisions and food perceptions. We expect that this study will be able to nudge consumers towards healthier food choices by manipulating food perception in different sensory modalities.