Feeling Blue: The Effects of Visual Cues on Temperature Perceptions

Product temperature is an important factor in food and beverage evaluations. While extreme food/beverage temperatures can sometimes be determined through visual cues, such as from steam emitting from a bowl or frost on a glass, temperature is usually evaluated through manual (i.e., hand) or oral haptic perception. When mediums such as insulated packaging prevent manual haptic temperature perception, oral perception is the primary mode of temperature evaluation. This research investigates how mere exposure to peripheral red and blue visual cues, such as the color of the cup a beverage is sampled from, the napkin a beverage is served on, or the color of the beverage itself, that consumers incidentally encounter influence product temperature perceptions. In addition, we investigate the downstream behavioral consequences of this effect on consumption volume and food preparation. We draw on theories of intersensory integration and propose that the relative weighting of haptic and visual cues in temperature evaluations will be a function of ease of obtaining visual (vs. haptic) information. We propose that because visual information has a relative advantage in terms of ease of encoding compared to haptic information, visual color cues will tend to receive more weight in temperature evaluations so that individuals exposed to a red color cue will rate a product as having a higher temperature than individuals who are exposed to a blue color cue. In six studies we show that exposure to red (blue) visual cues leads to higher (lower) product temperature perceptions which we term the color-temperature effect. We provide evidence that this effect is driven by visual cues receiving greater weight than haptic cues in temperature evaluations due to the ease with which visual cues can be encoded. We also show that this color-temperature effect can have downstream consequences on the volume of a product consumed as well as food preparation practices.