Discriminating Taste2 (or, Cola Detectives)

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Photos (top to bottom): Daniel (1-5), Vanessa (6-10).

Our taste discrimination experiment (can the kids taste the difference between Coke and a generic brand of cola?) had a few students really digging into the task. Here we see Daniel and Vanessa very methodically comparing the two samples for color, bubbles, and taste. Vanessa sipped, swooshed, gargled, and smelled, and corrected identified each of her four trials as SAME or DIFFERENT. Daniel missed only one.

Our results revealed the following:

% correct overall (29 Ss) 65.5%

% correct girls 71.7%

% correct boys 58.9%

While most students predicted that they'd be able to distinguish between the two brands of cola with ease, our results suggest that this ability is there, though not terribly impressive, with 50% being chance -- guessing.