| Abstract: | It has been demonstrated that mixtures of ‘primary’tastes may be perceived as singular rather than as multiple(Erickson and Covey, 1980). This finding may be accounted forin two different and testable ways. First, suppression: oneof the tastes in the mixture may be suppressed by the other(i.e., in a mixture of A and B, A suppresses the taste of B);the prediction which follows from this hypothesis is that asolution of A (the suppressing component) should be indistinguishablefrom the AB mixture. Secondly, synthesis: the singularity ofthe mixture may arise from the formation of a new taste, andin this case both components should be distinguishable fromtheir mixture. The present data indicate that the latter istrue in some cases. Since the taste of these mixtures must beother than the primary tastes used to form them, these findingsquestion the presumption that only four ‘primaries’are adequate to describe the range of tastes. |
