Garmt Dijksterhuis, Jos Mojet

Consumer and Market Insight, Dept. Food Quality, WUR/A&F Wageningen University and Research Centre, Agrotechnology and Food Innovations

P.O. Box 17, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

mailto:garmt.dijksterhuis@remove-this.wur.nl and jos.mojet@remove-this.wur.nl

Wednesday 10 August 2005. 16:15 – 18:15.

Memory is an important factor in the appreciation of food products and in food choice. The choice of food is mediated through liking and through expectations about the food. The expectations are a result from previous exposures to the food and they have representations in memory. Not all food experiences seem to be remembered veridically, and some sensory properties may be remembered better than others. The role of memory in food choice and liking is a complicated one since there are different types of memory and since it has strong relations to learning and attentional processes. Much of our everyday knowledge about the food we eat and drink has been acquired incidentally i.e. without explicit attention or learning. In most cases we are not aware of the existence of this implicit memory, although it may influence our behaviour quite substantially.

Key words: memory, implicit processes, attention, learning

We have scheduled four presentations in the workshop. Each presentation is scheduled to take 10 minutes, and we will allow for each presentation 10 minutes for questions and discussion. To round up we will have a general discussion about the papers, and the topic of the workshop.

16:15

Chairpersons' introduction

16:20

paper 1

Ep Köster, Memory for food and food expectations: a special case ?

(Sensory Science Group, Dept. of Food Science, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University/LMC, Copenhagen, Denmark and Agrotechnology and Food Innovations/Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, the Netherlands)

Abstract: Memory is usually tested by checking whether people can remember something they learned. This very limited view of memory is misleading since it does not take into account the much more important function of memory in changing our expectations and our approach to new events. This seems to be particularly clear in our normal dealings with food, which relies mostly on the lower senses (smell, taste, touch) that are seldom in the focus of conscious attention and where intentional learning plays almost no role. The methodological consequences of this view will be discussed and the question will be raised how this type of memory works and whether it is indeed specific for food or whether it is as general as some psychologists assume.

16:30

Questions and discussion paper 1

16:40

paper 2

Per Møller, Memory of sweetness and fat flavour: effects of liking and gender

(Sensory Science Group, Dept. of Food Science, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University/LMC, Copenhagen, Denmark)

Abstract: Memory obviously plays a major role in determining people’s expectations and choices of foods. In the experiment I will present here, which is part of a larger project relating sensory and nutritional properties of foods, we investigated how well young people remember sweetness and fattiness under natural conditions, where they had not been instructed to remember anything about the stimuli when they were first encountered (incidental learning). In order to be able to compare memory of fattiness and sweetness, we also determined perceptual discriminability between the targets and distractors used in the experiment.

Dividing Ss into likers and non-likers of the stimuli (fat and sweet distractors) at the median (same number of Ss in the two groups) we find:

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Subjects have better memory for fattiness than for sweetness

Non-likers have better memories for sweetness as well as for fattiness

Likers of sweetness remember the target as more sweet than it was

Memories are based on correctly rejecting new stimuli (distractors) rather than ‘remembering’ the target.

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The results of this experiment are in line with other recent experiments by J. Mojet, E.P. Köster, S. Issanchou, P. Møller and their coworkers. Investigating memory for smell, taste, flavour and texture these authors consistently find that people remember what they have not been presented with previously. These results are consistent with a suggestion that memory in the “lower senses” are tuned to “novelty detection”, rather than remembering the precise attributes of the target they are asked to pick out among a set of different stimuli (distractors).

16:55

Questions and discusssion paper 2

17:05

paper 3

Sylvie Issanchou and Claire Sulmont-Rossé, Measurement of implicit food memory: advances and difficulties

(INRA, Unité Mixte de Recherches FLAVIC, 17 rue Sully, Dijon, France)

Abstract: In everyday life, sensory characteristics of foods are learned in a non-intentional way and recollection of these memorized characteristics are usually implicit. That raises the question of the ecological validity of usual laboratory experiments used to test sensory and more specifically odor memory. Very few studies attempted to assess implicit recollection for odors. A first approach relies on priming paradigms. In such paradigms, memory is demonstrated if the performance on a target task is greater for primed stimuli than for non-primed stimuli. Different target tasks were used but none of them were completely satisfactory. The second approach relies on associative learning. Degel and Köster (1998) sucessfully demonstrated implicitly learned association between an odor and a place. However, the transposition of this method to food is difficult to achieve. We attempted to evaluate the change of sensory expectations induced by a visual cue associated during learning to a specific flavour or texture characteristic. Limits of this approach will be discussed.

17:15

Questions and discussion paper 3

17:25

paper 4

EH Zandstra. Creating memorable products: Actual Liking and Remembered Liking

(Consumer Perception & Behaviour, Unilever R&D Vlaardingen, The Netherlands)

Product choice is influenced by the remembered liking for that product at the time that the choice is made. Little research has been carried out on memory for the liking of foods, and yet remembered liking at the time of purchase maybe more influential on choice than liking ratings obtained during actual product consumption. During the presentation, the results of a recent study will be presented. The research is new in that it examines how liking ratings made during consumption are integrated to produce an overall remembered evaluation. We consider it as a first attempt in quantifying differences between actual and remembered liking experiences.

17:35

Questions and discussion paper 4

17:45

General discussion on the papers and the topic of the workshop.

18:10

Chairpersons' final comments and round up.

18:15