Abstract The most common tools to understand perception of food products are hall tests, surveys and observations. However, these approaches require large samples to get reliable results and they are rather costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, they are also highly expert-dependent and rely on the assumption that study participants can express their preferences consciously and explicitly. In our paper, we suggest an electroencephalography-based (EEG) approach to evaluate perceived product similarity in a cross-modal taste-visual task. We tested two potential neurometrics measured from Fz electrode: the amplitude of the N400-like evoked response potentials (ERP) and the power of induced gamma oscillations during 400–600 ms period after visual stimulus presentation. Both metrics showed a strong correlation with the perceived similarity scores at both individual and group levels; however, N400-like amplitude had greater inter-subject variability making it less suitable for practical applications. The results based on the power of induced gamma oscillations (N = 18) could be compared to traditional hall-tests (N = 200) and may potentially reveal subtle differences in food perception that can not be captured in the hall-tests.

中文翻译：

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在跨模式味觉任务中感知食品相似性的 EEG 相关性

摘要 了解食品感知的最常用工具是大厅测试、调查和观察。然而，这些方法需要大样本才能获得可靠的结果，而且成本高昂且耗时。此外，他们还高度依赖专家，并依赖于研究参与者可以有意识地、明确地表达他们的偏好的假设。在我们的论文中，我们建议使用基于脑电图 (EEG) 的方法来评估跨模式味觉任务中感知的产品相似性。我们测试了从 Fz 电极测量的两种潜在神经测量学：N400 样诱发反应电位 (ERP) 的幅度和视觉刺激呈现后 400-600 毫秒期间诱导的伽马振荡的功率。这两个指标都显示出与个人和组级别的感知相似度得分有很强的相关性；然而，类似 N400 的振幅具有更大的受试者间变异性，使其不太适合实际应用。基于诱导伽马振荡 (N = 18) 功率的结果可以与传统的霍尔测试 (N = 200) 进行比较，并且可能会揭示霍尔测试中无法捕捉到的食物感知的细微差异。