Memory psychophysics for taste

Subjects made quantitative judgments of taste stimuli (various concentrations of sucrose), which were either presented physically for a perceptual estimation or represented symbolically for a memory estimation. The perceived and remembered intensities were found to be related to the referent sucrose concentrations by power functions with similar exponents. This constancy of exponents contrasts with the lower memory exponents reported for other sensory continua, as well as with predictions based on theories of memory-based magnitude judgments. These results may further suggest a unique role for memory in chemosensation.