L21 - Flavour Preference Learning Flashcards
What 4 components make up flavour?
taste, odour, texture, trigeminal (pain, fizz)
Which two routes do odours reach the olfactory receptors through?
- Orthonasally (via nostrils)
2. Restronasally (via channel at back of throat)
Is there an innate hedonic reaction to odours?
NO - We learn our reactions to odours, even disgusting ones such as faeces
Liking and disliking flavours is due to learning
- Social learning
- Conditioning
Mere exposure effect
Tend to find unusual tastes unpleasant
Flavour-flavour learning
Associating flavour with taste
Flavour-calorie learning
Associating flavour with nutritional value
- more sensitive to motivational state
Harris: Latent inhibition and blocking effects in flavour learning
- Expose animal to sweet taste with no nutritional value
- Latent inhibition of sweetness as cue for calories so weakens overshadowing of almond by sweetness
- Blocking learning to like flavours too
Surveys of drinks and weight
“Diet drinks more likely to be consumed by people that are overweight”
Explanations: (2)
- Putting on weight diet is better option but doesn’t impact weight that much
Drinking diet drinks increases body weight 2. (Swithers and Davidson): eat slightly sweet food underestimates the amount of energy so doesn’t compensate as fully by eating less afterwards (Sweetened yog experiment showed diet yog ate more and gained more weight)
Problems with swithers-davidson experiment
- Guys getting diet food weight going up faster BUT animals vary in their acceptance of diet food, no point in including rats that don’t eat diet foods
○ Accidental bias of rats, huge variation in preference and amount they consumed
○ The ones that gained weight were the ones that were finicky
○ Shows some more applied aspect of flavour associations
Does flavour-flavour demonstrate extinction?
No, FF learning is resistant to extinction.
Does flavour-calorie demonstrate extinction?
YES, FC extinguishes rapidly
Human flavour-caffeine associations?
There is a greater enhancement of flavour preference for caffeine if it is paired with sweetness, and if caffeine is paired with a bitter flavour as the caffeine cancels the effect of the bitterness so that there is no change in flavour pleasure (i.e. both sweetness and caffeine have an additive effect in flavour liking).
Problems with human experiment
Hard to find flavours that people aren’t already familiar with / have a preference for
Brunstrom and Flecher (2008): is flavour learning automatic?
- Stimuli: Novel tea
- Got people to sample all teas then rank, then middle 3 selected, the most neutral
- Get a tea with saccharin added and other 2 teas with no saccharin added
- 2 trials to novel flavour
- Post test: rank the teas, interested Add more
- Found a preferences learning effect for sweetened food but only for hungry participants
- No relationship between how well the recall of sweetened teas, maybe occurs without awareness!
Saccharin vs sucrose
No nutritional value but sweetness in saccharin