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Familiarity and Retronasal Aroma Alter Food Perception

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Chemosensory Perception

Abstract

Introduction

When participants eat foods, they direct their attention to the particular taste quality that is the target of evaluation and subsequently perceive the intensity of the attended taste quality. We defined the ease with which participants pay attention to a particular taste quality as the “noticeability” of that quality. In our previous study, Japanese participants evaluated noticeability and intensity of five fundamental taste qualities (sweetness, umami, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness) under open- and closed-nostril conditions, using a popular traditional Japanese confection, yokan. The correlation between noticeability and intensity of sweetness was significantly reduced when participants were tested with open nostrils. Therefore, we hypothesized that high familiarity with a food and its olfactory information is necessary to decrease the correlation between these two scales.

Methods

In order to verify this hypothesis, we asked Japanese and German participants, who have different food cultures, to subjectively evaluate yokan, which is familiar to Japanese but unfamiliar to Germans. In a control condition, marshmallows were used which are familiar to all participants. Participants consumed each food under open- and closed-nostril conditions and evaluated the noticeability and intensity of the five fundamental taste qualities.

Results

There were significant differences between the participants’ groups as the correlation between noticeability and intensity was reduced significantly only for sweetness of a familiar food under open-nostril condition.

Conclusions

These results support our hypothesis that high familiarity with a food and its olfactory information might be necessary to decrease the correlation between noticeability and intensity of a particular taste quality.

Implications

This finding suggests that perception of a food is influenced by its familiarity and retronasal aroma. These results suggest when a food is unfamiliar, the noticeability and intensity of a particular taste quality are not much altered by the retronasal aroma, but when a food is highly familiar, retronasal aroma serves to decouple noticeability and intensity of a given taste quality.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are deeply grateful to Mr. Takuya Yokoi and Ms. Hiroko Hara (Toraya Research Institute, Toraya Confectionary, Tokyo, Japan) who gave us the idea for a psychophysics study using wagashi (Japanese confection). We also thank Ms. Ebru Baykal who performed the acquisition of the data of the German participants.

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Correspondence to Tatsu Kobayakawa.

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Funding

This study was partially supported by the Sapporo Bioscience Foundation and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 26245073, 16K04418, and 16KT0011.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the ergonomic experiments committee of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Gotow, N., Skrandies, W., Kobayashi, T. et al. Familiarity and Retronasal Aroma Alter Food Perception. Chem. Percept. 11, 77–94 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-018-9244-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-018-9244-z

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