The Psychology of Flavour

“Stevenson RJ: The Psychology of Flavour.”

“sniffing), retronasal olfaction, or the combined influence of the two senses of smell (see [1, 45])? The former certainly plays an important role in the setting of taste and flavour expectations [48, 49], and hence plays only a modulatory role, while the latter is thought to be constitutive of flavour experiences.”

“People perceive and appreciate food in a manner that is multisensory [2-4]; that is, information from the different senses is integrated at both the perceptual and semantic levels in order to give rise to specific multisensory experiences.”

“Flavour perception, then, can be considered as a system that controls ingestion, with the goal of picking up all available information about the food that is about to enter the body in order to secure an adequate supply of nutrients and avoid poisons [135].”

“Body odors constitute chemical signals that have evolved for species-specific communication (e.g., McClintock 2000; Stevenson 2009; Wyatt 2015).”

“…been long debated among researchers, but a number of recent studies have converged on the suggestion that the posterior insula and parietal operculum constitute the most likely candidate structures (e.g., Kringelbach, de Araujo, & Rolls, 2004; Rolls, Yaxley, & Sienkiewicz, 1990; Stevenson, 2009).”

“…drop in rated pleasantness for the other three colours of Smarties that had not been eaten.3 It was on the basis of this result that Rolls et al., and several other researchers thereafter, concluded that colour-based SSS does, in fact, exist (e.g., see Rolls & Rolls, 1997; Stevenson, 2009, p. 198).”

“, olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, auditory, visual, and trigeminal) to multisensory flavour perception have been examined for a wide variety of different food and beverage items (see [1,2] for reviews).”

“With regard to the influence of the appearance of food on people’s perception of its flavor, it is important to note that the color of a food or beverage often dominates over other sources of information regarding the flavor [9-13].”

“…for people to covertly direct their endogenous attention (Spence, 2014) selectively to just one element of an integrated flavour Gestalt (e.g., Delwiche, 2004; Small & Green, 2011; Spence, 2015a; Stevenson, 2009, 2014) – what some have chosen to call a ‘‘flavour object” (e.g., Lim & Johnson, 2012).”

“6:301. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00301 Searching for flavor labels in food products: the influence of color-flavor congruence and association strength Carlos Velasco1*, Xiaoang Wan2, Klemens Knoeferle3, Xi Zhou2, Alejandro Salgado-Montejo1,4 and Charles Spence1 1 Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimenta…”

“Beyond the basic tastes, however, there are more complex flavours and tactile sensations involved in eating and drinking (Auvray & Spence, 2008; Reinoso Carvalho et al., 2017; Stevenson, 2009).”

“…and sensory incongruity between what is expected and what is experienced while tasting can bring positive or negative reactions to the overall tasting experience (Stevenson, 2009; Spence et al., 2010; Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence, 2012; Spence, 2016; Velasco et al., 2016a; Yanagisawa, 2016).”

“…a much richer contextual backdrop, our olfactory judgments of a drink’s flavor are often prone to the effects of expectations derived from these other sensory sources (see Auvray & Spence, 2008; Stevenson, 2009; Verhagen & Engelen, 2006, for recent reviews of multisensory flavor perception).”

“…food or beverage results from the combination of olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, auditory, visual, and trigeminal cues (Auvray & Spence, 2008; Stevenson, 2009), and that our perception of food also depends on the way in which that food or beverage is consumed (and the utensils with which we…”

“As discussed in recent reviews (e.g. Auvray & Spence, 2008; Stevenson, 2009), several kinds of odour-induced taste modulation have been investigated.”

“As recently noted by Spence (2015a), our flavor expectations can have a profound influence on our daily taste/flavor experiences (see Stevenson, 2009; Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence, 2015, for reviews).”

“The tactile stimulation we receive in-mouth informs us about everything from the temperature of a food through to its texture (for example, [54-58]).”

“…various psychological capacities, such as enhancing the detection of threshold level odors (Djordjevic et al., 2004) and priming (Tomiczek and Stevenson, 2009); (3) it mimics various psychophysical parameters, relating to olfactory interactions, intensity and quality (e.g., Carrasco and…”

“…been tested, it seems uncontroversial to suggest that the link between a food's 518 appearance and its probable flavor results from prior learning and that the first opportunity 519 for this occurs during weaning (Stevenson, 2009), but the nature of the resulting 520 representation is less certain.”

“(7)Remember here that most people consider flavour to be a multisensory construct (see [78]).”

“Similarly, while there are reports in the literature of somatosensory– olfactory interactions, these are dwarfed by the robust and reliable interactions observed between taste and smell (Stevenson, 2009).”

“We would argue that it does, since orthonasal olfactory cues give rise to ‘flavour expectations’ that, in turn, anchor the subsequent flavour experience (see [6, 11]).”

“factors, including the tastes of salt, umami and possibly fat, other orosensory cues and 564 retronasal odours [142, 143].”

“…nine objects that corresponded to the major tactile properties identified in prior research (i.e., lumpiness, hardness, brittleness, adhesiveness [stickiness], viscosity, graininess, wetness, oiliness, warmth, cold; Engelen et al., 2005; Lawless & Heymann, 2010; Stevenson, 2009; Szczesniak, 2002).”

“There is evidence suggesting that previous experience may at least partly determine odor mixture perception (Stevenson 2009).”

“Taste perception refers to those sensations that are elicited by the stimulation of the gustatory receptors on the tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and more recently, umami—savory) (Stevenson 2009).”

“It is known that across a wide range of species body odors (chemiosignals) have a crucial communicative function [1]– [3].”

“Taiwanese young consumers expect that such a drink would present a mint taste/flavor [56].”

“Another measure of flavor binding is oral capture (Stevenson, 2009), as this appears to occur routinely in normal participants when an odorant occurs simultaneously with a tastant in the mouth (Stevenson, Mahmut, & Oaten, 2011; Stevenson, Oaten, & Mahmut, 2011).”

“According to Stevenson (2009), foods are identified visually and via the orthonasal olfactory system before being placed in the mouth.”

“Olfaction is a core component of flavour perception [1].”

“…associated with different senses are experienced as bound together in a single perceptual object and the unity of the multisensory perceptual object is a feature of the experience (the putative novel feature).11 It has been suggested that there is a distinct flavor modality (e.g., Stevenson 2009).”

“Similarly, the psychology of taste and how taste dictates food choice, acceptance, and hedonic behavior are in the process of being uncovered [4].”

“In fact, there has been mounting evidence showing that sensations of taste, retronasal odor, and somatosensation integrate and interact with one another (see Delwiche 2004; Verhagen and Engelen 2006; Stevenson 2009 for reviews).”

“Such multisensory advertising is particularly effective for food products, because taste perception is determined by collective sensory inputs among taste, olfaction, haptics, audition, and vision (Elder and Krishna 2010; Stevenson 2009).”

“The role of vision in ingestive behavior (e.g., Spence, 2013; Stevenson, 2010b), hazard detection (e.g., Croy et al., 2013; Regenbogen et al., 2017; Sarolidou et al., 2020) and social communication (e.g., Darwin, 1872; Ekman, 1993) is suggested in several places.”

“Consumption of a given substance depends on its look, smell, and, importantly, on its flavor (an emergent property based on taste, oral somatosensory, and retronasal olfactory cues; see Stevenson, 2009).”

“Second, odor and flavor encoding may be similarly efficient, since both have to fulfill important and different biological functions (Stevenson, 2009; Stevenson, 2010).”

“…cues are folded together in the brain with memories, emotions, and expecta‑ tions and, therefore, involve sociocultural, psychological, and psychosocial factors [24,25] and are subsequently interpreted within a given cultural context, tradition, and situational framework as a ‘taste experience’.”

“Although attention, identification, and access to semantic memory can be hard to disentangle in vision and audition (e.g., Revonsuo, 1999), this is not always the case in olfaction (e.g., Stevenson, 2009).”

“It has been argued that under the appropriate conditions, both sensory congruency and sensory incongruity between what is expected and what is experienced while tasting can bring positive or negative reactions to the overall tasting experience (Stevenson, 2009; Spence et al., 2010; Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence, 2012; S…”

“Thus, this phenomenon is called learned synesthesia (Stevenson, 2009).”

“, the sweet taste of sugar) and tastelike experiences generated by sniffing odours previously experienced with a taste in food (e.g., the sweet smell of caramel; Stevenson, 2009).”

“Smells or flavors are perceptually experienced not only as sensory qualities (bitter, sweet) but in terms of an affect that accompanies them, a liking or disliking (Bartoshuk, 1991; Stevenson, 2009, pp. 159–161).”

“In his book, Stevenson provided us with what is, and undoubtedly will remain to be, by far the most comprehensive academic summary of pretty much every study that has ever been published concerning how the senses interact to give rise to the emergent property that is flavor (well that is certainly how it felt on readi…”

“I characterize flavour experiences following Auvray and Spence (2008), who describe flavour perception as a perceptual modality that represents the properties of enti‑ ties positioned in the mouth in order to assess whether they can be eaten (see also Stevenson, 2009).”

“Mixtures of the 5 basic tastes cannot create the flavor of orange, coffee etc., and the enormous variation in possible flavor perceptions mainly results from (retronasal) olfactory perception (e.g., Stevenson, 2009; Prescott, 2012; Doty, 2015).”