highly significantp < 0.001
Because of the significant age disparity, age-adjusted analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed and demonstrated that sweet and sour remained highly significant (p < 0.001), salty remained significant with a reduced effect size (p = 0.03), and bitter became borderline and no longer statistically significant (p = 0.06), indicating partial age confounding for bitter detection (Table 6 ; Figure 5 ).