ELIMINATING ARTIFACTS IN THE STUDY OF SINGULARITY MIXEDNESS OF TASTE STIMULI/

Taste stimuli with a single solute were not judged as tasting equally singular; this confirmed earlier results, except in this study the pos sibility of the results being caused by trigeminal effects was virtual ly eliminated. Binary mixtures were generally perceived as more mixed than single solute stimuli, indicating a degree of analytic mixing. Ho wever, a caffeine/KCl mixture was perceived as more singular tasting t han some single solute stimuli, indicating a degree of synthetic mixin g. A preliminary examination was made of the hypotheses that the perce ived mixedness of a taste mixture might be determined by a summation o f the mixedness of its components or alternatively by latency effects.