| Abstract |
| Crossmodal correspondences between sensory modalities are often attributed to shared affective qualities, yet the structure and variability of such affective representations remain poorly understood. Building on previous research demonstrating crossmodal affective mapping between taste and music, the present study investigated whether these mappings are supported by a low-dimensional structure and whether they vary across directions and individuals. Using affective rating data from 28 participants, crossmodal classification was performed between gustatory and auditory stimuli. The results showed that classification accuracy exceeded chance level in both directions, indicating that affective information generalized between the examined gustatory and auditory stimuli. However, performance was significantly higher in the taste-to-music direction than in the music-to-taste direction, revealing a clear directional asymmetry. To examine the structure of affective representations, classification was repeated using the composite valence and arousal dimensions. While this low-dimensional model exhibited a comparable performance in the music-to-taste direction, it was less accurate in the taste-to-music direction, suggesting that valence and arousal capture the core structure of affect but are not sufficient in all contexts. Consistent with this interpretation, permutation-based feature importance analysis revealed no dominant contribution of individual affective descriptors, indicating that crossmodal mapping relies on distributed representations. Finally, substantial inter-individual variability was observed. Crossmodal performance was not significantly correlated across the two mapping directions, providing no clear evidence for a common performance factor across directions. Importantly, affective consistency was positively associated with performance in the taste-to-music direction, suggesting that the stability of affective representations contributes to crossmodal mapping under specific conditions. Collectively, these findings indicate that affective mapping between taste and music is directionally asymmetric and that valence and arousal capture an important but not universally sufficient component of crossmodal affective information. Exploratory individual difference analyses further indicate that the consistency of affective responses may contribute to mapping performance, although these findings require replication in larger samples. |
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| Key Words |
| Crossmodal Correspondences, Valence, Arousal, Taste, Music, Individual Differences |
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