Implicit Association Effects between Sound and Food Images: Supplementary Material

A growing body of empirical research documents the existence of several interesting crossmodal correspondences between auditory and gustatory/flavor stimuli, demonstrating that people can match specific acoustic and musical parameters with different tastes and flavors. In this context, a number of researchers and musicians arranged their own soundtracks so as to match specific tastes and used them for research purposes, revealing explicit crossmodal effects on judgments of taste comparative intensity or of taste/sound accordance. However, only few studies have examined implicit associations related to taste–sound correspondences. Thus, the present study was conducted in order to assess possible implicit effects associated to the crossmodal congruency/incongruency between auditory cues and food images during the classification of food tastes. To test our hypothesis, we used ‘salty’ and ‘sweet’ soundtracks with salty and sweet food images, and asked 88 participants to classify the taste of each food image while listening to the soundtracks. We found that sweet food images were classified faster than salty food images, regardless of which soundtrack was presented. Moreover, we found a congruency effect, demonstrating that such soundtracks are effective in eliciting facilitating effects of taste quality classification with congruent food images

Means and standard errors in the two AP tests (standard and variant).

<p>Dependent variable is the Type of error (SAME, DIFFERENT) measure for the intervals of interest (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006327#pone-0006327-t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a>).</p

Subjects gave their response by clicking with the mouse on the corresponding note presented as showed here in the standard AP test (top) and in the variant AP test (bottom).

<p>Subjects gave their response by clicking with the mouse on the corresponding note presented as showed here in the standard AP test (top) and in the variant AP test (bottom).</p

Means and standard errors in the dichotic test for the left and right ears.

<p>Dependent variable is the Type of error (SAME, DIFFERENT) considering only the intervals of interest (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006327#pone-0006327-t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a>).</p

Percent errors for the left and right ear in the intervals of interest (see Tab. 1) observed in the two groups in the dichotic test.

<p>Percent errors for the left and right ear in the intervals of interest (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006327#pone-0006327-t001" target="_blank">Tab. 1</a>) observed in the two groups in the dichotic test.</p

Percent errors in the intervals of interest (see Tab. 1) observed in the two groups in the standard and variant tests.

<p>Percent errors in the intervals of interest (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006327#pone-0006327-t001" target="_blank">Tab. 1</a>) observed in the two groups in the standard and variant tests.</p

Experimental paradigm.

<p>The different phases of the experimental paradigm are reported along the time-line. Grey box corresponds to the time of tDCS stimulation, which included the encoding task (A: anodal stimulation; C: cathodal stimulation; S: sham stimulation).</p