M. Laureati*1, L. Morin-Audebrand2, J. Mojet3, E. Pagliarini1, E.P Köster3

1) DISTAM, University of Milan, Italy;

2) UMR FLAVIC INRA-ENESAD, France;

3) Wageningen University & Research – CICS, the Netherlands; monica.laureati@remove-this.unimi.it

Memory plays an important role in food expectations and food choice. So far, no studies have compared implicit food memory in children, young and elderly people. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of age on implicit memory for taste, flavour and texture in custard dessert.

Forty-three young adults and 43 elderly people were invited to have a lunch under the cover-story of a hunger feelings study, while 43 children were invited to have a snack for a preference test. Both lunch and snack contained different items, including a custard dessert used as target. Participants returned 24 hours later and were unexpectedly asked to perform a memory test. They received target custard samples amongst a series of samples (distractors) varied by adding or substracting to the target different amounts of sugar, cherry flavour and thickener.

Subjects were asked to indicate whether or not they had eaten a sample the day before (absolute memory task) and to indicate whether each sample was more, less or equally pleasant than the custard eaten the day before (relative memory task). In addition, subjects were asked to rate their degree of liking for each sample.

Signal detection indices show a similar memory ability for the 3 groups, but it seems that for children, young adults and elderly people, taste, flavour and texture have different importance in memory. Sweetness seems to be better remembered than the other modalities for young and children, but not for the elderly. In all three groups the recognition depended more on a rejection of the distractors than on a positive recognition of the target. A good correspondence between liking and remembered liking has been found for children and young adults but not for the elderly.

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