•The effect of transparent packaging on consumer evaluations is addressed empirically.•People more likely to purchase products in transparent (vs. opaque) packaging.•Perceived attractiveness, ...tastiness, freshness, and quality mediated this effect.•Guidelines for commercial applications of this research are discussed.
Transparency in product packaging is appearing more frequently in the food/drink marketplace. That said, relatively little is known about the impact of seeing the food/drink within (as compared to more traditional opaque packaging designs) on product perception or consumer purchase intentions. The research reported here was specifically designed to address this important issue. Participants in an online experiment provided product evaluations of food packaging designs shown visually, as well as rated their willingness to purchase the product, across four product categories. This experiment compared packaging designs with: a transparent window, an image of the product on opaque packaging, or plain opaque packaging. Efforts were made to maximise ecological validity using ‘mock-up’ brands (that do not exist in real life) in order to avoid familiarity effects or bias from prior experience. The results highlighted the fact that transparent packaging increased willingness to purchase, expected freshness, and expected quality, as compared to packaging that used food imagery instead. In addition, participants expected the products to be tastier, to be more innovative, and were more liked overall in several of the product categories that were assessed. Mediation analyses suggested that transparent windows on product packaging can lead to increased willingness to purchase through a variety of means differing by product category. The implications of this research for brand managers, marketers, and public health researchers are discussed.
•Research is needed to clarify the mechanism(s) that account for crossmodal correspondences between tastes and shapes.•We systematically assess these correspondences across four ...experiments.•Participants consistently matched sweetness (tastant and word) to roundness.•People’s liking for a taste (but not taste words) appeared to influence their shape matching responses.
Crossmodal correspondences between gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell), and flavour stimuli on the one hand and visual attributes on the other have been extensively documented in recent years. For instance, people have been shown to consistently match specific tastes and flavours to particular visual shapes. That said, further research is still needed in order to clarify how and why such correspondences exist. Here, we report a series of four experiments designed to assess what drives people’s matching of visual roundness/angularity to both ‘basic’ taste names and actual tastants. In Experiment 1, crossmodal correspondences between taste names and abstract shapes were assessed. Next, the results were replicated in a larger online study (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 assessed the role of liking in the association between taste words and morphed shapes along the roundness/angularity dimension. In Experiment 4, basic tastants were mapped to the roundness/angularity dimension, while the mediating role of liking for each taste was assessed. Across the 4 experiments, participants consistently matched sweetness to roundness. What is more, people’s liking for a taste (but not their liking for imagined tastes) appeared to influence their shape matching responses. These results are discussed in terms of crossmodal correspondences, and a potential role for hedonics is outlined.
This article provides an overview of the recent literature on the use of internet-based testing to address important questions in perception research. Our goal is to provide a starting point for the ...perception researcher who is keen on assessing this tool for their own research goals. Internet-based testing has several advantages over in-lab research, including the ability to reach a relatively broad set of participants and to quickly and inexpensively collect large amounts of empirical data, via services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk or Prolific Academic. In many cases, the quality of online data appears to match that collected in lab research. Generally-speaking, online participants tend to be more representative of the population at large than those recruited for lab based research. There are, though, some important caveats, when it comes to collecting data online. It is obviously much more difficult to control the exact parameters of stimulus presentation (such as display characteristics) with online research. There are also some thorny ethical elements that need to be considered by experimenters. Strengths and weaknesses of the online approach, relative to others, are highlighted, and recommendations made for those researchers who might be thinking about conducting their own studies using this increasingly-popular approach to research in the psychological sciences.
•The effect of window shape on consumers’ product perceptions is evaluated.•Consumers have a general preference for rounded window shapes.•Similarly, triangular window orientation significantly ...influences product liking.•However, sweet/sour perceptions are not significantly manipulated by shape.•This novel application of prior findings helps lend validity to supporting theory.
Much previous work has demonstrated that the shape of different design elements, when viewed in relation to food, can influence consumers’ evaluations, perceptions, and intentions regarding the food viewed. However, relatively few studies have focused specifically on packaging design and, to date, just one has considered the shape of transparent packaging, a prevalent feature of modern packaging designs. We report the results of two within-participants online studies aimed at rapidly exploring the consequences of any crossmodal correspondences elicited by shape in the novel context of transparent windows on packaging design. Across both experiments, 209 participants viewed a subset of 7 window shapes, across 4 ‘faux’ brands in different product categories. Each packaging design was rated for expected overall liking of the product; willingness to purchase, tastiness, sourness, and sweetness, design innovativeness, and design attractiveness. Certain previous findings were replicated, in that a preference for circular (vs. rectangular) windows, and for upwards- (vs. downwards-)pointing triangles, was found. However, crossmodal correspondences between circular shapes and sweetness, and angular shapes and sourness, were not robustly observed. Explanations for this unpredicted finding are suggested. Furthermore, implications and recommendations for commercial practitioners of packaging design are made.
It has been proposed that impairments in emotion recognition in ASD are greater for more subtle expressions of emotion. We measured recognition of 6 basic facial expressions at 8 intensity levels in ...young people (6–16 years) with ASD (N = 63) and controls (N = 64) via an Internet platform. Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls at labelling expressions across intensity levels, although differences at very low levels were not detected due to floor effects. Recognition accuracy did not correlate with parent-reported social functioning in either group. These findings provide further evidence for an impairment in recognition of basic emotion in ASD and do not support the idea that this impairment is limited solely to low intensity expressions.
We introduce "EloChoice", a package for R which uses Elo rating to assess pairwise comparisons between stimuli in order to measure perceived stimulus characteristics. To demonstrate the package and ...compare results from forced choice pairwise comparisons to those from more standard single stimulus rating tasks using Likert (or Likert-type) items, we investigated perceptions of physical strength from images of male bodies. The stimulus set comprised images of 82 men standing on a raised platform with minimal clothing. Strength-related anthropometrics and grip strength measurements were available for each man in the set. UK laboratory participants (Study 1) and US online participants (Study 2) viewed all images in both a Likert rating task, to collect mean Likert scores, and a pairwise comparison task, to calculate Elo, mean Elo (mElo), and Bradley-Terry scores. Within both studies, Likert, Elo and Bradley-Terry scores were closely correlated to mElo scores (all rs > 0.95), and all measures were correlated with stimulus grip strength (all rs > 0.38) and body size (all rs > 0.59). However, mElo scores were less variable than Elo scores and were hundreds of times quicker to compute than Bradley-Terry scores. Responses in pairwise comparison trials were 2/3 quicker than in Likert tasks, indicating that participants found pairwise comparisons to be easier. In addition, mElo scores generated from a data set with half the participants randomly excluded produced very comparable results to those produced with Likert scores from the full participant set, indicating that researchers require fewer participants when using pairwise comparisons.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•The literature of taste–shape crossmodal correspondences is reviewed.•People associate non-packaging and packaging shape features with specific tastes.•A shared affective space of tastes and shapes ...may explain these associations.•Taste estimates are also influenced by consumers’ semantic knowledge about products.•Crossmodal correspondences can incorporate taste experience into packaging design.
A growing body of empirical research now demonstrates that people associate different basic tastes and taste words with specific packaging shapes. While it may be obvious that semantic knowledge concerning products, based on the packaging and/or design elements (e.g., typeface, logo, label, images), can guide the taste expectations that consumers generate in relation to a given product, here we demonstrate that there are also more fundamental correspondences that operate even with unfamiliar stimuli. Specifically, shape features (e.g., straight vs. curvy, or symmetrical vs. asymmetrical) have been shown to influence the taste that people naturally associate with a given shape. The evidence suggests that, at least to a certain extent, people match such shape dimensions with tastes on the basis of their common affective connotation. Here, we critically review the literature on these seemingly arbitrary, yet systematic, crossmodal correspondences between tastes and shape features. We suggest that they can inform the design process when it comes to product packages and labels with the aim of conveying taste information more effectively. This review is relevant to those researchers interested in taste-vision correspondences as well as to food marketers, and those designers interested in the communication and influence of taste information.
We report a cross-cultural study designed to investigate crossmodal correspondences between a variety of visual features (11 colors, 15 shapes, and 2 textures) and the five basic taste terms (bitter, ...salty, sour, sweet, and umami). A total of 452 participants from China, India, Malaysia, and the USA viewed color patches, shapes, and textures online and had to choose the taste term that best matched the image and then rate their confidence in their choice. Across the four groups of participants, the results revealed a number of crossmodal correspondences between certain colors/shapes and bitter, sour, and sweet tastes. Crossmodal correspondences were also documented between the color white and smooth/rough textures on the one hand and the salt taste on the other. Cross-cultural differences were observed in the correspondences between certain colors, shapes, and one of the textures and the taste terms. The taste-patterns shown by the participants from the four countries tested in the present study are quite different from one another, and these differences cannot easily be attributed merely to whether a country is Eastern or Western. These findings therefore highlight the impact of cultural background on crossmodal correspondences. As such, they raise a number of interesting questions regarding the neural mechanisms underlying crossmodal correspondences.
Recently, it has been demonstrated that people associate each of the basic tastes (e.g., sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) with specific colors (e.g., red, green, black, and white). In the present ...study, we investigated whether pairs of colors (both associated with a particular taste or taste word) would give rise to stronger associations relative to pairs of colors that were associated with different tastes. We replicate the findings of previous studies highlighting the existence of a robust crossmodal correspondence between individual colors and basic tastes. However, while there was evidence that pairs of colors could indeed communicate taste information more consistently than single colors, our participants took more than twice as long to match the color pairs with tastes than the single colors. Possible reasons for these results are discussed.
The Taste of Typeface Velasco, Carlos; Woods, Andy T.; Hyndman, Sarah ...
i-Perception (London)
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4
Journal Article
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Previous research has demonstrated that typefaces can convey meaning over-and-above the actual semantic content of whatever happens to be written. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that people ...match basic taste words (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter) to typefaces varying in their roundness versus angularity. In Experiment 1, the participants matched rounder typefaces with the word “sweet,” while matching more angular typefaces with the taste words “bitter,” “salty,” and “sour.” Experiment 2 demonstrates that rounder typefaces are liked more and are judged easier to read than their more angular counterparts. We conclude that there is a strong relationship between roundness/angularity, ease of processing, and typeface liking, which in turn influences the correspondence between typeface and taste. These results are discussed in terms of the notion of affective crossmodal correspondences.
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