General Wolfe School Science fair 2000/2001

Does Sight Affect Taste?

Our project was about sight and taste. (Does sight affect taste?) We wanted to see if sight affected taste in any way. So, we did an experiment.

Problem

We wanted to see if our sight affects or influences how we taste things, so we experimented by holding a blind taste test.

We will be testing as many people as we can, by testing as much females who are willing to volunteer and as much males who are willing to volunteer, in a variety of age groups, mostly our age. (Average age 12-14.)

Hypothesis

We think that sight does affect taste somehow. For example if you look at a food you don't our might not like and it doesn't look appealing, you get the impression it tastes bad. Or, it could be the opposite, you look at something good and you think it tastes good, because your mind and sight tells you that. But what if your sight couldn't work and you can't really see what if your eating? That is why we decided to research some of this. So we do an experiment. We blind fold people and give them Poptarts and apples, and they guess the falvors of each one. We think most of the people might not guess all the foods correctly.

 

Materials

• Blind Fold

• Strawberry, Raspberry and Blueberry Pop Tarts

• Red and Green apples

 

Method

We blind fold a person and give them each one piece of strawberry, one piece of blueberry and one piece of raspberry Pop Tart, and they tell us what they think each flavor is or guess the flavor of each one. Then, we give them one slice of red apple and one slice of green apple and they guess the type of apple. We record the results.

 

Observations

While doing the Experiments we observed that most people confused blueberry for raspberry or the other way around, and most people where sure that strawberry was strawberry. Some people also weren't sure about the apples, while others were more sure. Some also switched red for green and vice versa, but others identified each distinct flavor. In example, some knew one apple was much more sour; that was the green apple, while the others said the apples tasted the same and couldn't tell the difference.

While each subject was being fed, We noticed they didn't right away come up with an answer, unless they ate Pop Tarts regularly and knew the flavour well.

 

Conclusion

Doing this experimentation was interesting and we found that not all the people had the same taste, but the results were similar and most people kept mixing up blueberry and raspberry Pop Tarts while most were absolutely sure that we were feeding them strawberry, and when asked if they were sure and not raspberry or even blueberry, they responded with a definite yes.

Testing the people with apples was different. Either people were definitely sure or definitely unsure, unlike with the Pop Tarts where they were not so sure and kind of played around until they decided on what to guess. This part was interesting because we were almost sure they would guess the apples correctly, they each had, in our opinion, definite flavors; like green is sour and red is plain tasting.

In our experiment of ten people, only two of them got all the flavors right.

I think that we can conclude that not everybody's taste is the same, and that not all our subjects ate Pop Tarts a lot or apples a lot. More people in our experiment ate Pop Tarts more then apples. (Which we don't recommend doing.)

We think sight effects taste, Because if you can't see what your eating, that's not so exciting, just asking our experiment volunteers.

 

How It's Related to The Real World

This is related to the real world in some ways. We think it's important to have your five senses in the everyday world, and I can't imagine what it's like to miss out on these things that we might regard as little. If you take away one of your five senses it can affect you in ways you might not think possible. Some people think that if you don't have a sense you might be able to do other things without or with very little affect. Lots of people even say if they can live without a sense they would choose sight, but you don't know what your missing without sight.

We think that it is a big disadvantage to not have sight. People in a part of our experiment could not see what they were eating, so is that not a disadvantage? or can it be the opposite? it depends on how people look at it.

So as a concluding paragraph, we state that your sight dose effect taste despite what you think. Imagine to taste and not to look. It will be a very different world if we were all like that, wouldn't it?

Here are some links on the five senses:

 

1. funschool.com - Free Interactive, educational software for Kids

2.Come To Your Senses

3.Senses webquest

4.Five Senses - human senses - sensatory system - human body

5.Sensory Perception

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