#taste perception

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by Kyle Lim

Research has established countless times that eating is a multi-sensory experience. While eating, we often forget that our other senses influence our perception of taste and food to great lengths. We are constantly bombarded with packaging of all shapes, colors, and sizes that quietly affects how we perceive the taste of whatever’s inside. We may perceive a certain dish to be significantly less tasty based solely on the texture of the food. In the Philippines, one’s sense of smell is so associated with the taste of food that fast food giant Jollibee’s trademark phrase is Langhap Sarap, which loosely translates to “inhaled relish or deliciousness.” And who can forget Charles Spence, the scientist who has been making groundbreaking contributions to the world of food. I find his work to be quite fascinating, especially his Sound of the Sea dish at the Fat Duck as a product of collaborating with Heston Blumenthal.

Speaking of the Fat Duck’s famous dish, one sense modality that doesn’t seem to have a clear connection to taste is hearing. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a huge pool of studies regarding the relationship between the two, so it comes as no surprise that, in 2014, Charles Spence himself conducted a review of the existing literature. The rationale behind this decision is that in recent years, people have been complaining more and more about how the background music or noise in many dining establishments is simply too loud, which disrupts the whole dining experience. In fact, according to a recent Zagat survey, noise is currently the second most widespread complaint amongst diners, with poor customer service being the first. Spence’s review has explained that restaurant noise can reach decibels of up to 90 to 102, which is beyond the level of noise generated by city traffic. It doesn’t help that plenty of restaurants are shifting to a more industrial feel interior-wise, which involves the use of bare wood, stone floors, and stripped down surfaces that all enhance the reflectance of sounds.

What’s even more worrying is that restaurant managers and owners seem to be taking advantage of this. They have realized that playing loud and fast music would compel diners to talk less and consume more simply because they wouldn’t be able to hear each other properly. As a result, restaurant-goers leave establishments quickly and make room for more, thereby allowing restaurants and bars to generate more profit. There was even a study by Guéguen and coworkers in 2008 that found a relationship between drinking more and exposure to loud background music. They followed 120 customers in two bars in France and discovered that these people ordered significantly more drinks (around 3.4 drinks, finished in 11.5 minutes) when music was 88 to 91 decibels as compared to customers who were exposed to music of 72 to 75 decibels (around 2.6 drinks, finished in 14.5 minutes).

Spence’s review looked at several studies linking background noise or music with taste or smell perception, but unfortunately, some of them yielded null results. Here are a few that did result in significant outcomes:

Ferber and Cabanac (1987) found that people described sweet sucrose solutions as more pleasant when listening to loud background noise (90 decibels) as compared to loud music (90 decibels), “quiet” music (70 decibels), or total silence.

Woods and coworkers (2011) discovered that participants rated salty foods like crisps and cheeses as less salty and sweet foods like biscuits and flapjacks as less sweet in conditions of loud background noise (75 to 85 decibels). 

Seo and coworkers (2011) saw that an audio book verbal noise at 70 decibels had a more detrimental effect on odor discrimination task performance than party noise at the same decibel level.

A research by Spence himself and his coworkers revealed that olfactory stimuli were rated to be less pleasant in the presence of white noise rather than music.

As you can see, these studies do not actually clear up the relationship between noise and taste perception due to contradictory results. I think this just reveals that more research has to be done with regard to hearing and taste perception, and that there must be several other factors that caused the studies to turn out in a particular way. Even the existing explanations for why noise affects taste perception, such as the attention/distraction account or sensation transference (which you can Google to learn more about), lack empirical evidence and are quite theoretical in nature.

Spence’s review doesn’t seem to address the relativity of noise: that sounds considered to be noise by some people don’t necessarily appear to be noise for others. This issue grows in importance when we consider various cultures around the world, such as the Philippines, where eating is usually accompanied by noise and chatter. Additionally, we can even habituate or gradually get used to background noise up to the point of tuning it out and, in effect, not allowing the noise to affect whatever it is that you’re doing. 

I think Spence’s review deviated slightly from the problem he initially described and established. He started off the article by explaining how customers have been complaining about the increasing volume of background noise in dining establishments, yet he followed up by giving us examples of studies that dealt with hearing and taste perception. While this is still related to the eating experience, I would have like to seen him focus more on the relationship between food or restaurant ratings and specific background noises in specific places. A good example of this would have to be Yan and Dando’s 2015 study that looked at how participants rated certain solutions while listening to the noise in airline cabins, which is a place where food normally gets criticized. 

In spite of the still muddled relationship between hearing and taste, I think we can take away three key learnings from Spence’s work. First, we often fail to realize that hearing does have an effect on what we taste. When we think about food, the senses of sight, taste, smell, and even touch readily come to mind. We tend to forget that audition also plays a crucial part, so we are largely unaware of the effects it has on us. Second, you can actually pay attention when it comes to taste. When we put food into our mouths, we usually perceive its flavor as something highly specific or familiar, regardless of whether or not we are attending to it. Nothing more, nothing less. Bacon will always taste like bacon, and if it’s prepared differently, then it’s going to taste like how it was prepared. But as Spence’s work revealed, that’s not always the case, and distractions like noise can actually prevent us from attending to our food and having a more pleasant gustatory experience. Lastly, noise will always be a prevalent part of dining out. Whether we like it or not, we will constantly be surrounded by chatter, conversation, and background noise whenever we go out to eat. Dining out, after all, is normally a social activity, and food indubitably tastes better when shared with a friend or two.

References:

Spence, C. (2014). Noise and its impact on the perception of food and drink. Flavour, 3(9). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-3-9

Yan, K. & Dando, R. (2015). A crossmodal role for audition in taste perception. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, 41(3), 590-596. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000044

By Ryza Sollestre

3…2…1…

And the crowd goes wild! Your favorite team just won and the food never tasted so better! 

Cornell food scientists Noel and Rando examined how emotions from the outcome of college hockey games influenced the perception of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami taste to hedonic responses to food served after.

In their study, the fans were given a salted-caramel pretzel ice cream and lime-lemon sorbet.  The salted-caramel pretzel ice cream was rated more pleasant than the lime-lemon sorbet, which is a mix of a sweet and sour flavor. But when their team won, the lime-lemon sorbet obtained higher hedonic ratings. The positive state enhanced the sweet taste and diminished the sour flavor of the sorbet. So when the team wins, the less-favorable food was enjoyed as well. The opposite also follows. When the home team loses, the sorbet was perceived to be sourer and less sweet, thus low hedonic ratings. The wins or losses of the team did not affect the salty, bitter, and umami taste on the other hand. 

The researchers linked their findings to emotional eating, or overeating to relieve negative emotions. Since less-favorable food becomes more unappealing to our palate when we experience negative emotions, we reach for more hedonistic choices, most are unhealthy food. 

This could be the reason why you reach and crave for a gallon of ice cream, not just when the team you are rooting for loses but also when you are heartbroken, or why you fill your stomach with chips and chocolates in stressful situations.

The study was quite impressive in a way that they make use of a real-life manipulation than being confined in the laboratory. The results could be therefore assumed to parallel real life settings—that a pleasant or unpleasant event could influence our perception. 

So we’ve learned that taste perception is multimodal, meaning the taste of food can be influenced by our sense of sight, hearing, olfaction, and touch. Our experience is not limited to the ingredients used or the quality of food but interestingly, even our emotions could affect the taste of the food we eat. Our taste perception, therefore, is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processing.  This just shows how rich and complex our experience of how we perceive taste or flavor. With this, we should appreciate, savor, and relish the food we eat more, because it’s not just a plate of meal to fill your hungry stomach, but it is surely an experience making use of all your senses.

As self-confessed foodie, it is only natural to say that I consider it as a hobby to try out different places to eat. My family and I go to the most random of places simply for our love of food. We go restaurant hopping in the provinces, try out a carinderia offering breakfast food, or even dine in Spanish restaurants with names we can’t even pronounce. Even on my own, I make it a point to try out new dishes that I have never heard of before or try out new places even inside the campus. I guess what I’ve been trying to say is that…I LOVE TO EAT! (Who doesn’t anyway?)  Since for most of us, eating is a daily experience—something that we do so often. We simply think that eating involves our tongue and our taste buds but we may not fully appreciate that there are multiple senses and so different factors involved in an eating experience. 

Naturally, when we think of dining as an experience, we tend to equate it with simply eating or an experience focusing on the taste and flavor of food. But, come to think of it, what do actually affect our perception of a food’s taste and flavor? Luckily, numerous studies in the past have already explored this idea. Moa Strandberg (2014), for example, found that food coloring can influence the perception of a food’s flavor intensity and deliciousness. Interestingly, another study even found that presenting food in a manner inspired by an artwork also positively affects diners’ perception of its tastiness. Michel, Velasco, et al. (2014) presented participants with no ordinary salad for it was plated in a way that resembles the painting of a well-known artist named Kandinsky (check out the pic below- r: painting l:salad) . The tastiness of the dish was compared with a salad that was plated ordinarily and another that was plated in an organized but not artistic way. It turns out, the Kandinsky-inspired dish won the votes of most of the participants! So, our concept of aesthetics can not only be applied in works of art but even in food presentation. Michel and his team mates (2014) proved this as they found that the aesthetic appeal enhances the experience of eating a dish.  How cool is that?!

Interestingly, another factor that was found to influence taste perception is the type of cutlery that we use in eating. Yes! The kind of spoon, fork, or knife that you use can also affect our judgement of a food’s taste.

Interestingly, another factor that was found to influence taste perception is the type of cutlery that we use in eating. Yes! The kind of spoon, fork, or knife that you use can also affect our judgement of a food’s taste.

Vanessa Harrar and Charles Spence (2013) have done an interesting research on this using yogurt and cheese placed in spoons of various colors, weight, size, and shape. They explored this by conducting three experiments.

For the first experiment, they asked participants to sample yogurt in a teaspoon, tablespoon, and “fancy spoon” and asked them about their perception of its density, expensiveness, and sweetness. While there were no significant findings in terms of density and expensiveness, they have found that the perceived weight and size of a spoon affects perception of sweetness. The yogurt placed in a teaspoon scored to be the sweetest among the others. Harrar and Spence (2013) explains that this may be because we associate small spoons with desserts and so we think that when food is placed in one it tastes sweeter.

The pair then played on the colors of the spoons for the second part of their study. They used a red, blue, green, white, and black spoon and a blind test to see how it can affect the perception of saltiness, sweetness, expensiveness, and liking. They found that the color contrast of food placed in the spoon influences the perception of these factors. For example, they found that yogurt placed in a blue spoon was rated as saltier than that which was not. 

For the final phase of the study, they explored how the shape of the cutlery may affect the perception of saltiness, sweetness, sharpness, expensiveness, and liking across two groups: experienced (with cheese) and non-experienced. The cheese (aged and young) was placed in either a fork, spoon, knife, or toothpick. They found that the experienced tasters accurately rated the aged cheese as more expensive than the young one. Though there was no effect in sharpness, they found that it has an effect on saltiness. Cheese sampled using a knife was perceived as saltier than those that were sampled using a spoon or a toothpick. 

So the next time you want to show off your cooking skills to your friends, choose your cutlery wisely! Or you may even consider plating your pasta creation similar to the Mona Lisa ;) 

Blogged by Gail 

References

Harrar, V., & Spence, C. (2013). The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it.Flavour, 2(1), 1-13.

Michel, C., Velasco, C., Gatti, E., & Spence, C. (2014). A taste of Kandinsky: assessing the influence of the artistic visual presentation of food on the dining experience. Flavour, 3(1), 1-11.