Einar Risvik, Magni Martens, Øydis Ueland, Janna Bitnes, Per Lea, Margrethe Hersleth, Asgeir Nilsen, Harald Martens and Marit Rødbotten

Knowledge, new tools and hardware capacities are giving us new opportunities for understanding, handling and concept building based on complex information. Now is the beginning of an era with very exciting perspectives as sciences and tools development come together on what we like to describe as the multi disciplinary field of Sensory Science.

Understanding complex products
Assembling bits and pieces to describe a larger picture has been central in sensory profiling, but alternative uses of the same techniques may conclude that the whole never is assembled of pieces but a new entity also, so that the understanding of the bits and the whole may complement each other. This whole may be explored with the same techniques to understand the product and its consumer relevance, but also in relationship to how words and descriptors relate to each other. What does it mean that a wine is exotic or that a perfume is aggressive? How much of the perception is contained in the descriptive attributes and how much is contributed by individuals’ holistic perceptions, and can individuals evolve in their interpretation of such concepts?

Understanding complex situations
Meals are usually more complex than single products, but measuring and understanding the nature of this complexity is dependent upon context and the ability to think in several dimensions using tools and theories from different disciplines. E.g. a meal high in sensory and product complexity may still be perceived as simple depending on the experience of the consumer or the context in which it is served. 

Complex interpretations
In general, biological systems are complex. Already, ongoing experimentation has shown that sensory profiling of computer-generated, abstract images reflecting complicated mathematical models (non-linear differential equations) gives new insight into the development of life by cell differentiation.  It is an example of how sensory science's systematic use of human sensory perception and language capability can improve the researchers' understanding of mathematical and statistical models of complex systems.

Complexity goes at a product level, a perceptual and interpretative level as well as at a contextual level. The questions are many, proofs are few, but at the end of a Symposium we have taken the liberty to speculate on opportunities and developments. The paper aims to give examples and illustrations for future thoughts and to spark discussions.