Five studies explored identification of odors as an aspect of semantic memory. All dealt in one way or another with the accessibility of acquired olfactory information. The first study examined stability and showed that, consistent with personal reports, people can fail to identify an odor one day yet succeed another. Failure turned more commonly to success than vice versa, and once success occurred it tended to recur. Confidence ratings implied that subjects generally knew the quality of their answers. Even incorrect names, though, often carried considerable information which sometimes reflected a semantic and sometimes a perceptual source of errors. The second study showed that profiling odors via the American Society of Testing and Materials list of attributes, an exercise in depth of processing, effected no increment in the identifiability/accessibility beyond an unelaborated second attempt at retrieval. The third study showed that subjects had only a weak ability to predict the relative recognizability of odors they had failed to identify. Whereas the strength of the feeling that they would 'know' an answer if offered choices did not associate significantly with performance for odors, it did for trivia questions. The fourth study demonstrated an association between ability to discriminate among one set of odors and to identify another, but this emerged only after subjects had received feedback about identity, which essentially changed the task to one of recognition and effectively stabilized access. The fifth study illustrated that feedback improves performance dramatically only for odors involved with it, but that mere retrieval leads to some improvement. The studies suggest a research agenda that could include supplemental use of confidence judgments both retrospectively and prospectively in the same subjects to indicate the amount of accessible semantic information; use of second and third guesses to examine subjects' simultaneously held hypotheses about identity; use of category cuing or similar techniques to discover the minimum semantic information needed to precipitate identification; some use of subjects trained in quantitative descriptive analysis to explore whether such training enhances semantic memory; and judicious use of mixtures to explore perceptual versus semantic errors of identification.

No abstract

Abstract. [Context and Motivation]Development of innovative ICT-based applications is a complex process involving collaboration of all relevant disciplines. This complexity arises due to differences in terminology, knowledge and often also the ways of working between developers in the disciplines involved. [Question/problem] Advances in each discipline bring a rich design environment of theories, models, methods and techniques. Making a selection from these makes the development of distributed applications very challenging, often requiring a holistic approach to address the needs of the disciplines involved. This paper describes early stage requirements acquisition of a mobile nutrition education demonstrator which supports overweight persons in adopting healthier dietary behaviour. [Principal idea/results] We present a novel way to combine and use known requirements acquisition methods involving a two stage user needs analysis based on scenarios which apply a theory-based model of behavioural change and are constructed in two phases. The first phase scenarios specify an indicative description reflecting the use of the transtheoretical model of behavioural change. In the second phase, a handshake protocol adds elements of optative system-oriented descriptions to the scenarios such that the intended system can support the indicative description.[Contribution] The holistic and phased approach separates design concerns to which each of the disciplines contributes with their own expertise and domain principles. It preserves the applied domain principles in the design and it bridges gaps in terminology, knowledge and ways of working.

No abstract

The sensory perception of fat-free model foams with a consistency between pourable (liquid; xanthan thickened) and spoonable (semi-solid; gelled; carrageenan thickened) and varying level of aeration was studied. At low air contents (5, 10% v ⁄ v) perception is largely determined by the matrix properties; the presence of air is hardly experienced. On the other hand, at high levels of aeration (80% v ⁄ v) perception is determined by bubble characteristics and the matrix plays a negligible role in perception. Bubbles were better noticeable in a semi-solid, i.e. carrageenan matrix, than in liquid, i.e. xanthan-based foams. In semi-solid sucrose-ester carrageenan foams, large bubbles were perceived as more airy and less creamy, compared with the same compositions with smaller bubbles.