Relative Importance of Taste, Texture and Flavour on Consumers Memory for Custard Desserts
L. Morin-Audebrand*1, M. Laureati2 , J. Mojet3, C. Sulmont-Rossé1 and E.P Köster 3
1) UMR FLAVIC INRA-ENESAD, France; Leri.Morin-Audebrand@dijon.inra.fr
2) DISTAM, University of Milan, Italy;
3 ) Wageningen University & Research _CICS, The Netherlands.
Human food behaviour and liking largely depend on food memory. Studies performed by Köster & al (2004) and Mojet & Köster (2002) showed that food taste and texture characteristics are memorized. However, no study dealt with the relative importance of taste, texture and flavour on memory for a given food.
To answer this question, 43 young adults received a lunch including a custard dessert (target) among other items, under the cover-story of a hunger feeling study. This ensures that learning was incidental. Participants returned 24 hours later for a taste experiment. They were unexpectedly confronted with custard samples identical to the target and with distractors, i.e. samples varying in sweetness, thickness or flavour (-1.5 Just Noticeable Difference, +1.5 JND, +2.5 JND determined in a preliminary experiment with another group of young adults).
They were first asked to decide whether or not they ate these samples the day before (absolute memory test) and secondly to compare their perception of the samples with the remembered target on 10 attributes (relative memory test). Thirdly, they rated the perceived intensity of the 10 attributes for each sample.
The results of the absolute memory test show that participants were unable to recognise the target but correctly rejected the distractors, especially those varying in sweetness. The results of the relative memory test seem superior. Indeed, in that case participants correctly declared the presented target as identical to the remembered target for 9 of the 10 attributes. In addition, they managed to correctly declare all the sweet and thick distractors as varying respectively in sweetness and thickness in comparison with the remembered target, even if they did not manage to discriminate these samples from the target in the rating test. However, for the flavour distractors this relative memory seems more confused.
References
Mojet, J. & Köster, E. P. (2002). Texture and flavour memory in foods: An incidental learning experiment. Appetite, 38(2), 110-117. Köster, M. A., J. Prescott, E.P. Köster. (2004). Incidental learning and memory for three basic tastes in food. Chemical Senses 29(5), 441-453.