Sweet, salty, bitter & sour experiment to understand taste!

Henry

6CB

My Aim
I want to test how people detect taste. I have noticed that people taste different food with their tongue. I have read that different parts of the tongue identify the different taste groups of sweet, sour, salty and bitter. I also think that the smell and sight of different foods helps us to guess what they would taste of. So, to understand how the tongue works, we need to block out the senses of smell and sight.

Hypothesis
I think that people who think that different parts of the tongue identify different tastes are wrong and that all the tongue can identify all 4 different tastes.

The Experiment part 1

To test my hypothesis, my experiment is as follows: I prepare foods from the different groups: sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

The Experiment
My testers (my dad and my sister, Daisy) have to cover their nose and wrap a blindfold around their eyes.

The Experiment
They taste the foods with different parts of their tongues

List of Equipment/Resources
Equipment used is as follows: Plates (to hold the food.) Four different food types. Labels for the food Camera to record the experiment And blindfolds for the tasters.

Record of Results
We made a table of the results of the experiment.
Food Column1 Sugar Dark Chocolate Grapefruit Juice } } Salt Taster Taste Column2 Sweet Bitter Sweet Sour Salty Dad Where (on tongue) Column3 Tip Back Tip Back & side Side Daisy Column4 Sweet Bitter Sour Salty Column5 Tip Right Middle Front &middle

Analysis of Data
In the experiment I observed that: For sugar, both tasters thought it tasted sweet on the tip of their tongue. For dark chocolate, both thought it was bitter one tasted it on the back of the tongue the other tasted it on the right. For salt, both thought it was salty but one tasted it on the side of the tongue but the other tasted it on the front and middle. For grapefruit juice, both tasted it sour but one tasted it in the middle of the tongue and the other tasted it back and front. As well as sour, one tasted it sweet at the tip of his tongue. This shows that there are two possibilities. One is that the tasters had two different experiences. The other is that they had the same experience but we couldnt record it accurately. Either way both tasters used different parts of their tongues to experience the different taste of each kind of food group compared to the other food groups.

Conclusion
My experiment disproved my hypothesis because it is clear that different parts of the tongue taste different types of taste.

Future plans
I would like to do the tests again and have more data. It would be good to have many more tasters and a lot more different taste samples. Also by using a straw or a syringe I can make sure that the food can be tested more accurately on each part of the tongue.