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Journal ArticleDOI

Eating with our ears: assessing the importance of the sounds of consumption on our perception and enjoyment of multisensory flavour experiences

03 Mar 2015-Flavour (BioMed Central)-Vol. 4, Iss: 1, pp 3
TL;DR: A growing body of research now shows that by synchronizing eating sounds with the act of consumption, one can change a person's experience of what they think that they are eating.
Abstract: Sound is the forgotten flavour sense. You can tell a lot about the texture of a food—think crispy, crunchy, and crackly—from the mastication sounds heard while biting and chewing. The latest techniques from the field of cognitive neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of just how important what we hear is to our experience and enjoyment of food and drink. A growing body of research now shows that by synchronizing eating sounds with the act of consumption, one can change a person’s experience of what they think that they are eating.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
26 Mar 2015-Cell
TL;DR: This Perspective explores the contributions of distinct senses to the authors' perception of food and the growing realization that the same rules of multisensory integration that have been thoroughly explored in interactions between audition, vision, and touch may also explain the combination of the (admittedly harder to study) flavor senses.

279 citations


Cites background from "Eating with our ears: assessing the..."

  • ...It is almost 60 years since researchers first started thinking about the putative role of audition in the experience of food and drink (see Spence, 2015, for a review)....

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  • ...Hearing always comes at the bottom of the list when people—whether they be professional sensory scientists or regular consumers—are asked to rank the relative importance of each of the senses to flavor perception (see Spence, 2015 on this point)....

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  • ...It is important to remember that disconfirmed expectations can occur in both the sensory-discriminative and hedonic domains (Zellner et al., 2004; see Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence, 2015 for a review)....

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  • ...In the intervening years, a large body of sensory science research has been published, demonstrating that auditory cues do indeed play an important role in the multisensory perception of food attributes such as crispy, crackly, crunchy, carbonated, and even creamy (see Spence, 2015)....

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  • ...…(that hasmost typically been studied in the laboratory), in the real world, cognitive factors such as branding, labeling, packaging, and pricing also play an important role in determining our sensory-discriminative and hedonic expectations (see Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence, 2015 for a review)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
22 Apr 2015-Flavour
TL;DR: In this article, a large body of laboratory research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the colour of food and beverage items can exert a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations, and hence on the subsequent experiences, of consumers.
Abstract: Colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink. To date, a large body of laboratory research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the colour of food and beverage items can exert a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations, and hence on the subsequent experiences, of consumers (or participants in the lab). However, should the colour not match the taste, then the result may well be a negatively valenced disconfirmation of expectation. Food colours can have rather different meanings and hence give rise to differing expectations, in different age groups, not to mention in different cultures. Genetic differences, such as in a person’s taster status, can also modulate the psychological impact of food colour on flavour perception. By gaining a better understanding of the sensory and hedonic expectations elicited by food colour in different groups of individuals, researchers are coming to understand more about why it is that what we see modulates the multisensory perception of flavour, as well as our appetitive and avoidance-related food behaviours.

250 citations


Cites background from "Eating with our ears: assessing the..."

  • ...The smell and aroma of food and drink are clearly important here, as are, on occasion, the sounds of food preparation (see [22], for a review)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This review, with the focus squarely on the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), summarizes the state-of-the-art in the area and suggests that mixed reality solutions are currently the most plausible as far as delivering flavour experiences digitally is concerned.
Abstract: Review paper assesses the possibilities and pitfalls around the digitization of the chemical senses.Possibilities include delivery of ambient fragrance, digital flavour experiences.We highlight how the majority of the attempts at successful commercialization have failed, often in the face of consumer ambivalence over the perceived benefits/utility.Ultimately, we suggest that mixed reality solutions are currently the most plausible as far as delivering (or rather modulating) flavour experiences digitally is concerned.The identify key problems with digital fragrance delivery related to attention and attribution (i.e., being aware of stimulation and believing that it is doing the work). Many people are understandably excited by the suggestion that the chemical senses can be digitized; be it to deliver ambient fragrances (e.g., in virtual reality or health-related applications), or else to transmit flavour experiences via the internet. However, to date, progress in this area has been surprisingly slow. Furthermore, the majority of the attempts at successful commercialization have failed, often in the face of consumer ambivalence over the perceived benefits/utility. In this review, with the focus squarely on the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), we summarize the state-of-the-art in the area. We highlight the key possibilities and pitfalls as far as stimulating the so-called lower senses of taste, smell, and the trigeminal system are concerned. Ultimately, we suggest that mixed reality solutions are currently the most plausible as far as delivering (or rather modulating) flavour experiences digitally is concerned. The key problems with digital fragrance delivery are related to attention and attribution. People often fail to detect fragrances when they are concentrating on something else; And even when they detect that their chemical senses have been stimulated, there is always a danger that they attribute their experience (e.g., pleasure) to one of the other senses this is what we call the fundamental attribution error. We conclude with an outlook on digitizing the chemical senses and summarize a set of open-ended questions that the HCI community has to address in future explorations of smell and taste as interaction modalities

97 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The latest evidence concerning the various ways in which what the authors hear can influence what they taste leads to the growing realization that the crossmodal influences of music and noise on food perception and consumer behaviour may have some important if, as yet, unrecognized implications for public health.
Abstract: Food product-extrinsic sounds (i.e., those auditory stimuli that are not linked directly to a food or beverage product, or its packaging) have been shown to exert a significant influence over various aspects of food perception and consumer behaviour, often operating outside of conscious awareness. In this review, we summarise the latest evidence concerning the various ways in which what we hear can influence what we taste. According to one line of empirical research, background noise interferes with tasting, due to attentional distraction. A separate body of marketing-relevant research demonstrates that music can be used to bias consumers' food perception, judgments, and purchasing/consumption behaviour in various ways. Some of these effects appear to be driven by the arousal elicited by loud music as well as the entrainment of people's behaviour to the musical beat. However, semantic priming effects linked to the type and style of music are also relevant. Another route by which music influences food perception comes from the observation that our liking/preference for the music that we happen to be listening to carries over to influence our hedonic judgments of what we are tasting. A final route by which hearing influences tasting relates to the emerging field of 'sonic seasoning'. A developing body of research now demonstrates that people often rate tasting experiences differently when listening to soundtracks that have been designed to be (or are chosen because they are) congruent with specific flavour experiences (e.g., when compared to when listening to other soundtracks, or else when tasting in silence). Taken together, such results lead to the growing realization that the crossmodal influences of music and noise on food perception and consumer behaviour may have some important if, as yet, unrecognized implications for public health.

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
14 Jun 2019-Foods
TL;DR: A new framework of multisensory flavour integration is proposed focusing not on the food-intrinsic/extrinsics divide, but rather on whether the sensory information is perceived to originate from within or outside the body.
Abstract: When it comes to eating and drinking, multiple factors from diverse sensory modalities have been shown to influence multisensory flavour perception and liking. These factors have heretofore been strictly divided into either those that are intrinsic to the food itself (e.g., food colour, aroma, texture), or those that are extrinsic to it (e.g., related to the packaging, receptacle or external environment). Given the obvious public health need for sugar reduction, the present review aims to compare the relative influences of product-intrinsic and product-extrinsic factors on the perception of sweetness. Evidence of intrinsic and extrinsic sensory influences on sweetness are reviewed. Thereafter, we take a cognitive neuroscience perspective and evaluate how differences may occur in the way that food-intrinsic and extrinsic information become integrated with sweetness perception. Based on recent neuroscientific evidence, we propose a new framework of multisensory flavour integration focusing not on the food-intrinsic/extrinsic divide, but rather on whether the sensory information is perceived to originate from within or outside the body. This framework leads to a discussion on the combinability of intrinsic and extrinsic influences, where we refer to some existing examples and address potential theoretical limitations. To conclude, we provide recommendations to those in the food industry and propose directions for future research relating to the need for long-term studies and understanding of individual differences.

75 citations


Cites background from "Eating with our ears: assessing the..."

  • ..., the sounds that we hear when eating) can contribute to our perception of crispness, freshness and pleasantness for foods such as crisps, biscuits and fruit [70–73] (see Reference [74] for a review)....

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References
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Book
10 Jul 2014
TL;DR: The authors argue that the authors must go beyond four or five individual taste sensations to focus on the interaction of multisensory experiences as it is here that flavour emerges and show how a host of sensory elements ranging from the colour of the plate to the frequency of concurrent sounds all affect the ways they perceive flavour.
Abstract: The central idea behind this book is deceptively simple: that our perception of flavour is multisensory. Consequently, to serve up great tasting food is not simply a matter of tickling the taste buds but of engaging a whole range of sensory experiences. Drawing on recent innovative research carried out by Spence’s team at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, the authors argue that we must go beyond four or five individual taste sensations (which respond to particular sensory nodes on the tongue) to focus on the interaction of multisensory experiences as it is here that flavour emerges. They show how a host of sensory elements ranging from the colour of the plate to the frequency of concurrent sounds all affect the ways we perceive flavour. Spence and his team have published prolifically on the topic, and ‘The Perfect Meal’ is evidence of a wider aim to encourage those in the food industry to think about eating as a multisensory experience and therefore allow professionals to better deliver positive results to diners and consumers. Rather than looking at food itself the focus is on the particular performance of fine dining, shrouded in the mystery and spectacle that comes along with the molecular gastronomy oeuvre made famous by Heston Blumenthal or restaurants such as El Bulli. By engaging directly with this trend the authors ‘hope that chefs would want to find out more about how changing the aroma of a food (by adding the aroma of strawberry or vanilla, say) can change its perceived sweetness and how changing the colour of a food or beverages can send a very powerful signal to the diner’s brain about the likely taste and flavour they are about to experience’ (p. 22). Affiliating themselves with the recent term ‘gastrophysics’, this new, high-tech ‘science of the table’ uses ‘well controlled experiments’ to ‘investigate the way in which people... respond to sensory stimuli’ (p. 18) The physical responses that taste experiences elicit in us offer a potentially powerful tool in the context of the food industry by offering the scope to manipulate our experiences of food in much more precise and fundamental ways. Throughout the book the authors methodically build a case for the inclusion of a number of elements in the multisensory perception of taste. In Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, they elaborate the role that different devices employed in restaurants can play in enhancing a meal. Addressing in turn the start of the meal (the menu, setting of the tables, waiters, etc.), the language and labelling used on the menu, the plate itself and the cutlery, these chapters summarize the latest research to show how these various elements affect the way we perceive flavour. A prominent example from the authors’ own research is the finding that a dessert on a round white plate tasted up Int. Jrnl. of Soc. of Agr. & Food, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 129–131

231 citations


"Eating with our ears: assessing the..." refers background in this paper

  • ...It is to this field of research, sometimes referred to as gastrophysics [8,76,77], that we now turn....

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  • ...In the future, my guess is that various technologies, some of which will be embedded in digital artefacts, will increasingly come to augment the natural sounds of our foods at the dining table [8,23]....

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  • ...sonically interesting, using everything from a sprinkling of popping candy through to using the latest in digital technology (see [7,8], for reviews)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Combining the analysis of acoustic recordings with mechanical testing results has been successful for predicting crispness and crunchiness of snack foods and the next stage for acoustic research should be to relate the structure of the products to the sounds produced during mechanical breakdown of the Products in order to fully understand the textural properties of the food.
Abstract: The relationship that acoustic sensations have with the perception of texture has been studied for crisp, crunchy and crackly products This has involved evaluating the contribution of chewing sounds to the perception of these textures or recording noises produced during mastication and evaluating various acoustic parameters from the resulting amplitude–time curves Combining the analysis of acoustic recordings with mechanical testing results has been successful for predicting crispness and crunchiness of snack foods The next stage for acoustic research should be to relate the structure of the products to the sounds produced during mechanical breakdown of the products in order to fully understand the textural properties of the food

226 citations


"Eating with our ears: assessing the..." refers background in this paper

  • ...[41,49-54]; see [6,55], for reviews of this early research; and [56], for a more recent review)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the frequency spectra and amplitude-time characteristics of sounds produced by biting crisp foods were studied. And a model system involving a generalized cellular structure was proposed to explain the generation of a crisp sound, which is the result of the rupture of a single cell or cell wall.
Abstract: The theory is proposed that crispness is primarily an acoustical sensation. The frequency spectra and the amplitude-time characteristics of sounds produced by biting crisp foods were studied. The frequencies present in crisp sounds cover a broad range. Amplitude-time plots show irregular variations in loudness with time. A model system involving a generalized cellular structure is proposed to explain the generation of a crisp sound. As a crisp cellular material is crushed, a series of sounds is produced. Each sound is the result of the rupture of a single cell or cell wall.

198 citations


"Eating with our ears: assessing the..." refers background or result in this paper

  • ...results provide evidence for the importance of oralsomatosensation to our experience of food, the fact of the matter is that auditory cues play a key role in the delivery of this sensation [6]....

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  • ...And while Vickers and Bourne [6] originally suggested that crispness was primarily an acoustic sensation, Vickers herself subsequently pulled back from this strong claim [49]....

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  • ...Vickers Z, Bourne MC: A psychoacoustical theory of crispness....

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  • ...Vickers Z, Bourne MC: Crispness in foods—a review....

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  • ...[41,49-54]; see [6,55], for reviews of this early research; and [56], for a more recent review)....

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BookDOI
14 Sep 2011
TL;DR: This chapter discusses Cue Combination, which combines vision with Audition and Touch, In Adults and In Children Burr, Binda, & Gori, and the Statistical Relationship.
Abstract: Preface I. Theory and Fundamentals 1. Ideal-Observer Models of Cue Integration Landy, Banks, & Knill 2. Causal Inference in Sensorimotor Learning and Control Wei & Kording 3. The Role of Generative Knowledge in Object Perception Battaglia, Kersten, & Schrater 4. Generative Probabilistic Modeling: Understanding Causal Sensorimotor Integration Vijayakumar, Hospedales, & Haith 5. Modeling Cue Integration in Clutter Sahani & Whiteley 6. Recruitment of New Visual Cues for Perceptual Appearance Backus 7. Combining image signals before 3D reconstruction: The Intrinsic Constraint Model of Cue Integration Domini & Caudek 8. Cue Combination: Beyond So-Called "Optimality" Rosas & Wichmann II. Behavioral Studies 9. Priors and Learning in Cue Integration Seydell, Knill, & Trommershauser 10. Combining Vision With Audition and Touch, In Adults and In Children Burr, Binda, & Gori 11. The Statistical Relationship

197 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Intensity of flavor, socially and culturally learned expectations, psychological and physiological factors, sex, socio-economic class, image of a food, and eating occasions influence awareness and attitudes to texture among adult consumers.
Abstract: Although its awareness appears to be present on a subconscious level, texture plays a very essential role in determining people's feelings about foods. Intensity of flavor, socially and culturally learned expectations, psychological and physiological factors, sex, socio-economic class, image of a food, and eating occasions influence awareness of and attitudes to texture among adult consumers. Texture awareness is increased when expectations are violated, associations are made with non-food items, or unpleasant mouth sensations are experienced. Textural qualities are often linked with whole-someness and excellence of food preparation.

196 citations


"Eating with our ears: assessing the..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Other foods that people often describe as especially crispy include tortilla chips and, perhaps unsurprisingly, crisps [38]....

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