Lots of scientific research has focused on food consumption and how our perception of taste can be influenced by many different environmental and external factors so it only makes sense this extends to coffee tasting. Eg your setting, noise, colours, etc. So not just thermal properties of cups will have an impact, but also things as trivial as the shape, colour, way it disperses aroma, etc.
The human mind is a funny thing and it really just reiterates how despite our best attempts to objectivise coffee, a large part of it still remains a uniquely human experience that can’t purely be reduced to numbers or explained by them all the time.
