Investigation of Biological Signals Under the Stimulation of Basic Tastes

Recently, neuromarketing has attracted attention as it is a marketing technique analyze consumer’s emotion using biological signal, which could genuinely understand consumers. From recent studies using the observation of brain wave (EEG), there are changes in emotional patterns (among the four emotions: Happy, Angry, Sad, Relax) according to the satisfaction on taste. In this work, we investigate the biological signals (EEG and ECG) under the stimulation of basic tastes: sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness and savory taste (umami), while taking into account individual preference in the evaluation. In the experiment, all subjects were test cognitive detection threshold before proceeding to the main experiment. The level of concentration that yields a just-noticeable threshold taste was used as the cognitive threshold for each subject for EEG and ECG data collection. The biological signals were used to classify emotion and compare with subjective evaluation. The experiment results proved that human emotion is effected by the taste stimuli.