Bitter Monday and sweet Friday — The bidirectional relationship between taste and time

Abstract The conceptualization of time is based on the physical experience in space ( Vyvyan Evans 2004 ). Linguistically and psychologically, time is represented in two deictic spacetime metaphors: the ego-moving metaphor and the time-moving metaphor ( Herbert H. Clark 1973 ). In the current research, two studies were conducted to investigate a novel relationship between taste and time. In Study 1, participants drank honey water and black coffee separately before interpreting a temporally ambiguous question. The results showed that whereas sweet taste tilted participants toward the ego-moving perspective in disambiguation, bitter taste slanted participants toward the time-moving perspective. To find out whether the influence of taste on time could be reversed, Study 2 primed participants with the ego-moving- or the time-moving-framed contextual statements before asking them to gauge the sweetness of honey water and the bitterness of black coffee independently. It was observed that in contrast to the ego-moving prime that prompted higher sweetness scores, the contrary prime begot higher bitterness ratings. Across the two studies, emotion was shown to correlate with taste and time perspective. Taken together, our findings buttress the embodied cognition theory by furnishing preliminary evidence that taste can affect and be affected by time. Implications for the interplay between sensation, emotion, culture, and temporal cognition are discussed.