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.