Abstract
It has been reported that color could affect the judgment of taste. However, it was not fully investigated whether the effects of color were based on cognitive/decisional or perceptual processes. Here, we investigated the effect of color on the judgment of sweetness using taste adaptation method. The judgment became stronger when our participants evaluated the sweet solution colored as subjectively consistent with sweetness, irrespective of before and after the adaptation to a non-colored sweet solution. In contrast, the effect of color was not observed when the participants adapted to a colored sweet solution and judged non-colored sweet solutions. While the judgment of sweetness was modulated by the colored target sweet solution, the colored solution did not affect the magnitude of perceptual adaptation. Thus, we could assume that color could affect the judgment of taste mainly in cognitive/decisional domains.
