Analysis of taste mixtures by adults and children.

Children at mid-childhood (8-9 years), have limited perceptual-attentional skills to analyze complex stimuli (Shepp, Barrett, & Kolbet, 1987), and little is known of their skills to analyze chemosensory stimuli. Accordingly, this study investigated the ability of adults and 8-9 year old children to perceive tastes in binary mixtures. In Experiment 1, subjects used a selective attention procedure to indicate whether sweet, salty, and sour tastes were present in stimuli consisting of sucrose (sweet), sodium chloride (salty), citric acid (sour), and all possible binary mixtures of these tastants. Adults correctly recognized the two tastes in all mixtures, whilst children recognized only one in each mixture. Children were successful in recognizing sweet in both sweet-containing mixtures and salty in the sodium chloride-citric acid mixture. In Experiment 2, subjects used a similar selective attention paradigm to assess the perceived intensity of the three tastes in the above single and two-component stimuli. Suppression of one or both components was recorded with most mixtures by both age groups. However, with the mixture sodium chloride-citric acid, only the children recorded suppression of sourness, whilst for adults only saltiness was suppressed. In neither mixture containing sourness did children report suppression of sweetness or saltiness. It is concluded that at mid-childhood humans have difficulty analyzing taste mixtures into their components, due to attentional and possibly gustatory shortcomings.

The development of meat-eating habits during childhood in Australia.

The development of meat-eating habits of 999 Australian children between 1 and 16 years of age stratified across socioeconomic groups, was determined using a 4-day diary and measurement procedures to document intake. The results indicated that a stable pattern of meat-eating behaviour, as regards the frequency and type of meat eaten was established during the period 1-4 years of age and remained until 10-12 years for males and until at least 14-16 years for females. In contrast, the amount of meat consumed increased with age, the greatest increases occurring with adolescent males who ate the largest amounts of beef, chicken and pork. It is suggested that the early establishment of meat-eating habits may reflect a more general effect that may occur with other types of food.

Perception of sweetness in simple and complex taste stimuli by adults and children.

Currently, there is little information on the ability of children to analyse complex chemosensory stimuli in terms of the presence and magnitude of the components. The present study investigates this question by comparing the ability of 95 adults and 8- to 9-year-olds to estimate the sweetness of several concentrations of sucrose in water and in three foods, namely, orange drink, custard and shortbread biscuits, using a magnitude estimation procedure. The results indicated that similar response functions were produced by adults and children for the sweetness of aqueous solutions of sucrose, custard and biscuits, but not for orange juice, where the functions produced by both female and male children were significantly flatter than those of the adults. Stimulus context may have influenced the ratings of children in the no-sucrose and highest sucrose concentration conditions with two of the foods. The absence of differences between the response functions of the female and male children with all types of stimuli indicated that gender had no influence on their responses. It is concluded that, at mid-childhood, humans are capable of estimating the sweetness of sucrose in foods, but that they have a tendency to limit the range of numbers used in their estimates of sweetness at high concentrations of sucrose in some foods.

Temporal processing of odor mixtures reveals that identification of components takes precedence over temporal information in olfactory memory.

Temporal processing of binary mixtures results in odorants being perceived in series separated by many hundreds of milliseconds. Since the odorant perceived first is the main suppressor, knowledge of the order of perception of two odorants can allow prediction of interactions in mixtures. The present study investigated the temporal coding of ternary mixtures composed of carvone, coniferan and triethylamine, and citralva, lillial and triethylamine using a specially constructed air-dilution olfactometer. The results indicated that even though each of the components could be readily identified in ternary mixtures, it was very difficult to indicate which odor was perceived first, with chance scores being recorded. The same outcome occurred even when the 'slowest' odorant was delivered 600 ms after the 'fastest' to the nose. It is proposed that olfactory memory gives precedence to identification of the components of mixtures rather than to their order of perception when more than two odorants are in a mixture.

A comparison of the ability of 8-9-year-old children and adults to detect taste stimuli.

Conflicting data exist in the literature regarding the maturity of the human sense of taste during childhood and if gender influences gustatory development. To investigate these 2 questions, taste detection thresholds for the 4 common tastants sucrose, sodium chloride, citric acid, and caffeine were established for 61 young adults and 68 children aged 8-9 years old, using a paired-comparison forced-choice procedure. No significant differences were found between the mean thresholds of women and men, or between those of female children and adults. In contrast, male children had significantly higher thresholds for all 4 tastants than adult females, for all tastants except caffeine than adult men, and for sucrose and sodium chloride than female children. It is concluded that the taste sensitivity of 8-9-year-old males, although well developed, has not fully matured, and that taste sensitivity is not affected by gender in young adults.

The influence of flavor and color on drink identification by children and adults.

This study investigated how color and flavor influences drink identification by children and adults. The children ranged in age from 2 to 18 years of age. Each subject tasted four drinks that differed in color and flavor. Each drink had an atypical color-flavor pairing (e.g., brown-pineapple) or a typical pairing (e.g., brown-chocolate). After tasting each drink, the subject chose which of four flavor names identified the drink. For the atypical drinks, the selection of color-associated names (e.g., chocolate for a brown drink) decreased, and the selection of flavor-associated names increased with age from the preschoolers to the adults. For the typical drinks, the selection of the correct name was greater than 80% for all ages. These results suggest that drink identification becomes more influenced by flavor as children get older because of an increase in the ability of children to focus on flavor as their perceptual-attentional skills mature.

Responsiveness of Western adults to pitch-distributional information in melodic sequences.

Responsiveness of musically trained and untrained adults to pitch-distributional information in melodic contexts was assessed. In Experiment 1, melodic contexts were pure-tone sequences, generated from either a diatonic or one of four nondiatonic tonesets, in which pitch-distributional information was manipulated by variation of the relative frequency of occurrence of tones from the toneset. Both the assignment of relative frequency of occurrence to tones and the construction of the (fixed) temporal order of tones within the sequences contravened the conventions of western tonal music. A probe-tone technique was employed. Each presentation of a sequence was followed by a probe tone, one of the 12 chromatic notes within the octave. Listeners rated the goodness of musical fit of the probe tone to the sequence. Probe-tone ratings were significantly related to frequency of occurrence of the probe tone in the sequence for both trained and untrained listeners. In addition, probe-tone ratings decreased as the pitch distance between the probe tone and the final tone of the sequence increased. For musically trained listeners, probe-tone ratings for diatonic sequences tended also to reflect the influence of an internalized tonal schema. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the temporal location of tones in the sequences could not alone account for the effect of frequency of occurrence in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 tested musically untrained listeners under the conditions of Experiment 1, with the exception that the temporal order of tones in each sequence was randomized across trials. The effect of frequency of occurrence found in Experiment 1 was replicated and strengthened.