Egon Peter Köster

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Psychology

In this paper we analyze some key concepts and problems in olfaction and argue that many concepts borrowed from vision are not helpful in elucidating the functions of human olfaction. This is illustrated with several examples. Olfaction is rarely in the focus of human attention. Olfaction is, compared to vision, a ‘hidden sense’, but still guides m...

Memory for odors is believed to be longer-lasting than memory for visual stimuli, as is evidenced by flat forgetting curves. However, performance on memory tasks is typically weaker in olfaction than vision. Studies of odor memory that use forced-choice methods confound responses that are a result of a trace memory and responses that can be obtaine...

Odor memory is commonly believed to be very strong and long-lasting. The present study examined factors that impact odor recognition memory over short delay intervals (immediately or 30-seconds after target presentation) with emphasis on memory task (forced-choice vs "monadic"/single stimulus yes/no), odor category, and target/foil relationship. We...

The complexity of consumer perception of food products is still underestimated. Simply determining a product's averaged pleasantness in a single test may not be the best way to predict the product's future in the market. Not only is there a multitude of aspects and their mutual interactions that come into play, but the relationship between the cons...

Sensory memory plays an important role in perception. This chapter discusses the spontaneous and implicit sensory learning and memory processes as they function in the ordinary person in everyday life. Implicit sensory memory differs in a number of aspects in face recognition and odour recognition; both depend strongly on incidental learning. Altho...

This chapter discusses the world of food perception, memory and appreciation. It reviews the development and change of preferences from before birth until old age, refers to psychological theories and findings about short- and long-term changes in liking. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms and factors that determine changes in liking over lo...

The perceived complexity of new food products plays a crucial role in their introduction to the market. Simple flavors and textures that have the advantage of being accepted at first sight quickly become boring, whereas complex new tastes are not immediately liked, but have to pass a phase of exploration before becoming liked for a much longer time...

Odor, taste, texture, temperature, and pain all contribute to the perception and memory of food flavor. Flavor memory is also strongly linked to the situational aspects of previous encounters with the flavor, but does not depend on the precise recollection of its sensory features as in vision and audition. Rather, flavor memory is directed at novel...

In an effort to find a simple method to measure implicit and unconscious emotional effects of food consumption, a number of methods were compared in an experiment in which 3 groups of at least 24 subjects were each exposed to a pair of yoghurts of the same brand and marketed in the same way, but with different flavours or fat content. The methods u...

In an effort to find a simplemethod tomeasure implicit and unconscious emotional effects of food consumption, a number of methods were compared in an experiment in which 3 groups of at least 24 subjects were each exposed to a pair of yoghurts of the same brand and marketed in the same way, but with different flavours or fat content. Themethods used...

Olfactory memory plays an important role in the everyday lives of both animals and humans, even if people generally attend much less than animals to incoming olfactory information. This chapter focuses on recognition memory and learning paradigms useful in characterizing the olfactory memory system. Recent studies on odour recognition memory have e...

Abstract Do people who claim to have olfactory imagination process odors more efficiently? In three same–different experiments, using all possible combinations of odors and odor names as primes and targets, selected high imagers (n=12) were faster (±230 ms; P<0.01) than low imagers (n=12) on tasks involving the perceptual interpretation of visually...

Our senses have developed as an answer to the world we live in (Gibson, 1966) and so have the forms of memory that accompany them. All senses serve different purposes and do so in different ways. In vision, where orientation and object recognition are important, memory is strongly linked to identification. In olfaction, the guardian of vital functi...

The stability of liking for salt reduced/re-formulated bread was tested in a home use test for three weeks. Salt was partially replaced by naturally brewed soy sauce. Fifty-six consumers were provided with regular bread (variant A) and another 59 were provided with salt-reduced soy sauce bread (variant B). During this period, the consumers were ask...

The stability of the liking for salt reduced products was tested in a rapidly repeated exposure study using soup and bread (with ham). Salt was partially replaced by naturally brewed soy sauce. First, 44 consumers performed 5 two-alternative forced choice tests to establish the exchange rate (ER) at which table salt could be replaced with soy sauce...

Two experiments were carried out using olfactometers that delivered two stimuli with an interval of, respectively, 0.2 s (experiment 1) and 4.0 s (experiment 2) in a same– different paradigm. In experiment 1 (four men, age 38.5± 15.2 and six women, age 25.8±1.2), four odors and in experiment 2 (nine men, age 23.4±2.6 and ten women, age 22.7± 1.9),...

After a thorough diagnostic analysis of a recent flop, including the verification of its possible causes and eventual repair of the product as described earlier (1), attention is given to the formulation of a new communal protocol for the formation of product development teams and steps to be taken to avoid future flops and to create successful new...

Odors are powerful in bringing back old and vivid memories bearing emotional content. This inherent hedonic property of olfactory stimuli makes this sensory modality particularly suitable for studying autobiographical memory. In the present work, adolescents (first experiment), young adults (second experiment), and elderly (third experiment) of bot...

This paper sketches a procedure to reduce the failure rate of new food products in the market by providing better pre-launch decision criteria. The method also offers considerable potential for the improvement of internal collaboration between the different departments (marketing, R&D and production) involved in new product development. The procedu...

This experiment investigated incidental learning and memory in children (age 7–10 years) for three different foods (fruit juice, fruit purée and biscuit), varied in sweetness. Children (N = 286) were exposed to three target foods and 24 h later their incidental learning was tested for one of the foods by asking them to recognize the target among di...

During an evaluation of the effects of a French sensory education program for 8–10 years old school children, an experiment was carried out to investigate the influence of the program on the development of children’s preferences for stimuli differing in arousal potential (higher complexity and/or intensity).An experimental group (n = 101) who parti...

http://cepe.univ-poitiers.fr/tl_files/CepeArts/Recherche/colloques/ActesFunFood2010/PDF/p32.pdf

In this review, an impression will be given of the development of a number of problems in odour pollution research and that are still either unsolved today or for which a solution has been found without being fully accepted. In order to stress the importance of the problems and their development rather than of the research devoted to them, we will...

The evaluation of the temporality of the sensory perception in food products is mainly assessed using the time¿intensity (TI) methodology. This approach is useful for studying the temporal aspects of the perception of a given sensory attribute in a product. When TI is used for several attributes, it quickly becomes very time-consuming because one r...

Food developers frequently check the liking for their recipes by asking consumers to state their preferences. This approach is often criticised for the lack of commitment of the participants and the artificiality of the hedonic response. This study tested whether an authenticity test could also be used as an alternative to a traditional hedonic tes...

Eating, drinking and food choices are among the most frequent human behaviours. Although seemingly simple, they are complex behaviours that are determined by many factors and their interactions. The complexity of the research field stresses the necessity to attack problems in an interdisciplinary way. Unfortunately, truly interdisciplinary approach...

In the present study, food memory for three sensory aspects involved in food perception, taste, texture and aroma, is compared. Participants received a lunch including a custard dessert (target) under incidental learning condition. One day later, participants were presented with samples identical to the target and with distractors varying either in...

The influence of age of the consumer and food novelty on incidentally learned food memory was investigated by providing a meal containing novel and familiar target items under the pretense of a study on hunger feelings to 34 young and 36 older participants in France and to 24 young and 20 older participants in Denmark and testing them a day later o...

As part of 'EduSens', a project aiming to measure the effect of a sensory education program developed in France on the food behaviour of school children, the present paper shows the results regarding neophobia. One hundred and eighty children (8-10 years old) were involved in the study. Half of them (experimental group) were educated during school-...

The role of stimulus arousal potential in the effect of repeated exposure on the liking for a food was investigated. Eighty-nine participants rated four uncommon fruit drinks for arousal (novelty, complexity and taste intensity), and were exposed to these drinks over 24 trials. Their liking for each drink was regularly recorded during exposure. Res...

Incidental and intentional learning and memory for 2 novel flavors were compared in young and elderly subjects. Incidental and intentional learning groups rated 2 new soups on acceptability for different occasions and were tested for memory the next day. On the first day, only the intentional group was asked to memorize the stimuli. With incidental...

ABSTRACTA battery of sensory tests is proposed to select potential descriptive panelists. This set of tests is flavor specific. Several abilities are examined: odor and taste recognition, odor memory, discrimination and descriptive capacities. A detailed example of such a battery to select a Camembert cheese descriptive panel is given. The objectiv...

Marketing professionals and sensory scientists have several hedonic testing methods at their disposal to assess product acceptability. The central location test (CLT) which usually takes place in a standardised location under controlled conditions is more frequently used than the home use test (HUT). Given the artificial conditions of a CLT, it is...

The importance of perceived complexity, a "collative property" as defined by [Berlyne, D. E. (1967). Arousal and reinforcement. In Nebraska symposium on motivation (pp. 1-110). University of Nebraska Press], to the dynamic development of preference was investigated. Eighty-six female and 82 male subjects rated their liking for and various collative...

Previous experience with food inarguably has an effect on current liking. This has the logical consequence that there must be a memory for previous food experiences. Not much is known about this type of memory compared to, say, the memory for pictures or verbal memory. In recent years the veridicality and the accessibility of a food related memory...

Are verbal associations to uncommon odors helpful in remembering these odors? Two groups of young subjects (each 12 female and 12 male) learned to associate three one-syllable nonsense words to three uncommon odors and were exposed equally often to three other odors in a same-different test. The odors in the learning condition of the first group we...

Memory for texture plays an important role in food expectations. After fasting overnight, subjects (41 women, 35 men, age 19¿60 years) received a breakfast including breakfast drink, biscuits and yoghurt. Subsequently, they rated their hunger feelings every hour, and returned for a taste experiment in the evening. When unexpectedly confronted with...

The stimuli used in taste research are usually considered to be odourless. This was tested in two experiments with aqueous solutions of two representative compounds for each of the five taste qualities including umami. In the first experiment elderly and young subjects rated the intensity and pleasantness of three concentrations of the stimuli, whi...

Forty three subjects were invited under the pretence that they would take part in an experiment on hunger feelings. They came without having eaten anything that morning and received a standard breakfast containing orange juice, cream cheese on crackers and yoghurt. These products were later (when subjects returned after scoring hunger feelings duri...

Studies of human odour memory have in most cases been obscured by the experimental designs utilised, in which verbal memory played a crucial role in the subjects' performance. Previously, attempts have been made to minimise verbal mediation in the assessment of odour memory by the use of incidental or implicit learning, which is how odours are lear...

The role of memory in the “lower” senses has only recently been studied in an ecologically valid way. Most learning and memory in the lower senses is of an implicit nature and remains inaccessible to conscious interpretation. This means that many of the explicit methods used for studying verbal and visual memory are inadequate. New methods have bee...

Sensory science and consumer science are very young compared with the other scientific disciplines from which they have borrowed well-established methods. Methods and practices commonly used in sensory science and in consumer research are critically reviewed from a psychologist's point of view and alternative solutions are suggested. Five frequent...

The traditional view of measurement repeatability is discussed in the light of psychological theories about stability and change in preference and choice behavior. The argumentation is illustrated by data obtained in groups of children and adults who are exposed to the same hedonic sensory measurements a number of times. It is demonstrated that fir...

The human organs of perception are constantly bombarded with chemicals from the environment. Our bodies have in turn developed complex processing systems, which manifest themselves in our emotions, memory, and language. Yet the available data on the high order cognitive implications of taste and smell are scattered among journals in many fields, wi...

The human organs of perception are constantly bombarded with chemicals from the environment. Our bodies have in turn developed complex processing systems, which manifest themselves in our emotions, memory, and language. Yet the available data on the high order cognitive implications of taste and smell are scattered among journals in many fields, wi...

In a procedure for the selection of two equivalent sets of familiar and two equivalent sets of unfamiliar odours for use in odour memory studies, 24 naïve subjects were first asked to rate the familiarity, perceived complexity and pleasantness of 54 a priori unfamiliar odours and 57 a priori familiar odours and to identify the latter. After selecti...

Memory plays a major role in the formation of food expectations. How accessible and how accurate is incidentally acquired and stored product information? In the present experiment the memory for variations in texture (and flavour) was tested with a new and ecologically valid method. Subjects (N=69: 35 women, 34 men, age 19-59 yrs) came to the insti...

To test the hypothesis that longevity of odor memory is due to strong proactive interference (reduction of new learning by prior learning) and to absence of retroactive interference (reduction of prior memory by new learning), subjects, matched in age and gender with those of a previous experiment, were unknowingly exposed in two sessions to the we...

To test the hypothesis that longevity of odor memory is due to strong proactive interference (reduction of new learning by prior learning) and to absence of retroactive interference (reduction of prior memory by new learning), subjects, matched in age and gender with those of a previous experiment, were unknowingly exposed in two sessions to the we...

One hundred and fifty-two subjects, divided into eight groups, were exposed to a room with a low concentration of either orange or lavender and to an odorless room. In a careful double-blind procedure, neither the subjects nor the experimenters were made aware of the presence of the odors in the experimental conditions. Later they were asked to ind...