Color–taste correspondences influence visual binding errors

People consistently associate tastes with colors (e.g., sweet-red, sour-yellow, salty-blue). Here, we examined the effect of the congruency of color–taste correspondences on unimodal visual feature binding by studying illusory conjunctions (binding errors). The visual stimuli were typical food words associated with sweet, sour, and salty tastes, and were presented in red, yellow, and blue font. The participants reported the font color of one of the two words with food names presented in pairs briefly under conditions of divided spatial attention. The words were either congruent or incongruent with the color-taste correspondences. The participants made more Illusory conjunctions in the incongruent condition (e.g., sweet-yellow and sour-red) than in the congruent condition (e.g., sweet-red and sour-yellow). These results suggest that the congruency of color-taste correspondences can bias unimodal visual binding errors, likely through a top-down effect.