Feeling the Flavour: Exploring Children's Touch–Taste Cross-sensory Correspondences and Willingness to Try Unknown Foods for Child–Food Interaction Design

2026. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Priscilla Lo, Tegan Roberts-Morgan, Matthew Horton, Janet C. Read & Oussama Metatla.

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Feeling the Flavour: Exploring Children's Touch–Taste Cross-sensory Correspondences and Willingness to Try Unknown Foods for Child–Food Interaction Design

How can we leverage taste expectations to create novel food-based experiences for children? Eating is an embodied process that engages multiple senses. Cross-sensory correspondences may offer educational and recreational opportunities to design interactive applications that encourage diversifying encounters with food. We present a study with 64 children (ages 10-11) who explored eight textured materials hidden inside mystery "food'' boxes and reported both their expected tastes and willingness to eat. Our findings provide evidence of touch–taste cross-sensory correspondences in children - sweetness with weak-hard-brittle and strong-soft-brittle materials, and saltiness with a weak-soft brittle material - and how these mappings influenced children's openness to unknown foods. These results provide empirical grounding for cross-sensory interaction design with children, demonstrating how texture could scaffold curiosity and learning. We outline design implications for cross-sensory food interfaces, non-edible public exhibits, and playful educational technologies that could broaden eating experiences and enable new forms of virtual food interaction.

Full paper

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3772318.3790894

Citation

Lo, P. Y., Roberts-Morgan, T., Horton, M., Read, J., & Metatla, O. (2026). Feeling the flavour: exploring children's touch–taste correspondences and willingness to try unknown foods for child–food interaction design. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–16).

BibTeX

@inproceedings{lo2026feeling, title={Feeling the Flavour: Exploring Children's Touch--Taste Correspondences and Willingness to Try Unknown Foods for Child--Food Interaction Design}, author={Lo, Priscilla Y and Roberts-Morgan, Tegan and Horton, Matthew and Read, Janet and Metatla, Oussama}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, pages={1--16}, year={2026} }