Incidental and intentional flavour memory in young and older subjects
Per Møller1, Jos Mojet2 and Egon Peter Köster2
1) Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Denmark
2) Wageningen UR – CICS, The Netherlands; ep.koster@wxs.nl
Incidental and intentional learning and memory for novel flavours were compared in 33 young (age 24.1 ± 3.1 yrs) and 31 elderly (age 65.9 ± 5.3 yrs) subjects. Both the young and elderly subjects were divided into two groups, respectively ‘the incidental learning group’ and the ‘intentional learning group’. The incidental and intentional learning groups consisted of approximately the same number of men and women. All groups rated two novel soups on acceptability for different occasions and their memory was tested the next day. On day one, only the intentional group was asked to memorise the stimuli.
With incidental learning, memory performance of the elderly and young was equally good, but the young performed better with intentional than with incidental learning, whereas the elderly did not. There were no age-related differences in perceptual discrimination. When comparing perceived flavour with the memory of it, the elderly tend to overrate the intensities of remembered flavour attributes, whereas the young tend to underrate them. Memory was not related to flavour pleasantness or neophobia.
Like memory for taste and texture, flavour memory is mainly tuned at detecting changes and based on "feelings of not knowing” rather than on precise identification and recognition of previously encountered stimuli.