What Influences Human’s Flavor Perception to Skittles?

Previous studies have shown that visual information can affect flavor perception. The aim of the present work was to study how the information of Skittles (Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company China), influences the Chinese adult subject expectations and their flavor perception. Five flavors matching five colors of Skittles were evaluated by forty graduate and undergraduate students under sighted condition (expected, observing product color), unsighted condition (blinded, only tasting the product) and incongruent verbal color labeling condition (blinded, informing incongruent verbal color). The results confirmed the previous findings concerning the cross modal interactions of color and flavor perception, that is visual information which can be seen by subjects interacts with the flavor perception, and for the first time, demonstrated that incongruent verbal color labels failed to function on multisensory, while learning and memory might involve in the color and flavor interaction. No gender difference was found in all sessions though the female showed a trend of better flavor perception compared with the male. *Corresponding author: Dr. XuJun Wu, The Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China; E-mail: [email protected] Citation: Wu, X., et al. What Influences Human’s Flavor Perception to Skittles? (2017) J Pharm Pharmaceutics 4(2): 15. What Influences Human’s Flavor Perception to Skittles? MuRu Zhou2, GuanCheng Qiu3, JingKuan Wei4, LiXin Yang4, XuJun Wu1* Received date: September 20, 2017 Accepted date: October 25, 2017 Published date: November 01, 2017 DOI: 10.15436/2377-1313.17.1691 Wu, X., et al. color-flavor associations modulated their flavor discrimination responses[6]. Further, they found that flavor perception involves the combining of chemosensory information with both visual (color) information and cognitive, expectancy based (label) inputs[10]. Meanwhile, label information was found to influence the consumer chocolate acceptability[11-12]. Besides the color and label information, Crisinel and Spence studied the cross modal associations between food and musical notes, pitch and eating sound, and confirmed that the auditory information interacts with the taste perception[8,13-17]. The auditory information acted as a conditioned cue, different from the indications of a food’s name which could raise a direct image of a certain food.