Chem. Senses 28: 301-313,
2003
© Oxford University Press 2003
A Psychophysical Investigation of Binary Bitter-compound Interactions
1 Monell Chemical Senses Center, 3500 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA 2 Firmenich SA, Route des Jeunes 1, Geneva, Switzerland CH-1211
Correspondence to be sent to: Russell Keast, Monell Chemical Senses Center, 3500 Market St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. e-mail: keast{at}monell.org
The aim of this study was to determine if taste interactions occur when bitter stimuli are mixed. Eight bitter stimuli were employed: denatonium benzoate (DB), quinine-HCl (QHCl), sucrose octaacetate (SOA), urea, L-tryptophan (L-trp), L-phenylalanine (L-phe), ranitidine-HCl, and Tetralone. The first experiment constructed individual psychophysical curves for each subject (n = 19) for each compound to account for individual differences in sensitivities when presenting bitter compounds in experiment 2. Correlation analysis revealed two groupings of bitter compounds at low intensity (1, L-trp, L-phe, and ranitidine; 2, SOA and QHCl), but the correlations within each group decreased as the perceived intensity increased. In experiment 2, intensity ratings and two-alternative forced-choice discrimination tasks showed that bitter compounds generally combine additively in mixture and do not show interactions with a few specific exceptions. The methods employed detected synergy among sweeteners, but could not detect synergy among these eight bitter compounds. In general, the perceived bitterness of these binary bitter-compound mixtures was an additive function of the total bitter-inducing stimuli in the mouth.
Key words: additive, bitter taste, suppression, synergy, taste interactions, taste psychophysics
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