Incidental Learning and Memory for Three Basic Tastes in Food

Forty three subjects were invited under the pretence that they would take part in an experiment on hunger feelings. They came without having eaten anything that morning and received a standard breakfast containing orange juice, cream cheese on crackers and yoghurt. These products were later (when su...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Chemical senses 2004-06, Vol.29 (5), p.441-453
Main Authors: Köster, M.A., Prescott, J., Köster, E.P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Beverages
Biological and medical sciences
Cheese
Citrus
Female
Food
food expectancy
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Hunger
incidental learning
Learning
Male
Memory - physiology
memory psychophysics
Olfaction. Taste
Perception
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Sex Characteristics
Stimulation, Chemical
Taste - physiology
taste memory
Yogurt
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Summary:Forty three subjects were invited under the pretence that they would take part in an experiment on hunger feelings. They came without having eaten anything that morning and received a standard breakfast containing orange juice, cream cheese on crackers and yoghurt. These products were later (when subjects returned after scoring hunger feelings during the day) used as targets amidst a set of distractors varied by adding or subtracting different amounts of two basic tastes. Orange juice was varied in sweetness and bitterness, cream cheese in sourness and bitterness and yoghurt in sweetness and sourness. The changes were made comparable by using just noticeable differences, determined in preliminary experiments with other subjects, as units of change. Two measurements of memory were compared, an absolute (indicating which were the targets) and a relative one (indicating whether the targets and distractors were more, less or equally pleasant, sweet, sour, bitter or salty as the item eaten at breakfast). Both methods showed incidental learning, but relative memory was superior. Memory differed between tastes and was partly product dependent. These experiments suggest that taste memory is tuned to detect novel and potentially dangerous stimuli rather than to remember features of earlier experienced stimuli with great precision.
ISSN:0379-864X
1464-3553
1464-3553
DOI:10.1093/chemse/bjh047