Effect of presentation procedure on taste intensity functions

Magnitude estimations were made for the taste intensity of sodium chloride (NaCl) and quinine sulfate (QSO₄) presented by three different methods: sip, anterior dorsal tongue flow, and whole-mouth flow. Power functions fitted to the data indicate that, for the anterior tongue stimulus (NaCl), the two flowing procedures produced lower exponents than did the sip procedure. For the posterior tongue stimulus (QSO₄), the exponent obtained with dorsal tongue flow was lower than the exponents obtained with either of the whole-mouth procedures, sip or flow. The results are compared to previous experiments on ratio scaling of taste intensity to elucidate the effects of several procedural variables.