The Effect of Colour on a Person’s Perception of Taste
By Isabella Sanidas
Junior Category (Grades 7-8)
Experiment | Biology, Chemistry, Psychology
BCVSF Note: The required ethics forms have been submitted for this project.
My experiment is based on changing the colour of the same flavoured food and determine if it affects people’s perception of its taste. I asked my participants to taste the same flavour of jello but in three different colours. Then I asked them to rate which colour was unappealing and which tasted the best. I hypothesize that if I change the colour of the same flavoured jello then their perception of taste will hopefully change. I used three different colours of jello and all were the same flavour. So by changing the independent variable, which is the colour, I wanted to observe
if the dependent variable, the person’s perception of taste, changes. My results determined that even though all the jello was the same flavour, 93.3% of people sampled said that each colour was a different flavour. For example, by looking at my pie charts I could see that most people thought that the orange coloured jello tasted like orange and the red tasted of strawberry. In conclusion, I could tell that our eyes influence what we taste before we taste it.
