Oral chemical irritation: does it reduce perceived taste intensity?

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Abstract
In an experiment in which capsaicin was presented in physical mixture with taste stimuli, no reduction in perceived taste intensity, relative to the control condition, was observed. This result is inconsistent with previous reports of taste intensity reductions when oral chemical irritants were only periodically interspersed among taste stimuli (Lawless et al., 1985; Lawless and Stevens, 1984). A second experiment directly compared the two presentation formats and their respective control conditions in a repeated-measures design. The results of that test confirm that greater apparent reductions in taste intensity are observed when the oral irritant is presented as a periodic rinse even though perceived irritation under rinse conditions regularly falls to levels significantly below those maintained with mixture presentations. This observation indicates that much of the apparent masking of taste intensity in the presence of oral irritation is not directly related to irritation level but is sensitive to procedural variation.

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