Blog 14

On Friday, Emma, Sosie, and I further developed our ideas as to how we should carry out our experiment. We are sticking with our original idea of testing how visual perception influences taste perception, and we have come up with some more details for our experimental design. Instead of making actual popsicles, we are going to make smaller versions using an ice tray and coloring each individual cube. Each ice cube will have the exact same flavor, but the color will vary. A test subject will taste three different colored cubes and tell us what they think the flavor is. Between each 'popsicle', the person will eat a saltine for palate-cleansing purposes. After the person has sampled three popsicles, we will provide a list of fruits that are associated to the colors of popsicles, from which the person will determine which flavor each one was. We decided that it would be beneficial on our part if we provided flavor options so that we can more easily graph our results after the experiment. Our hypothesis is as follows: The color of the popsicle will directly influence the subject’s perception of the taste even though the flavor of each Popsicle is identical.