An Approach to Measuring Adolescents' Perception of Complexity for Pictures of Fruit and Vegetable Mixes

Abstract

Complexity is an important parameter in the food industry because of its relationship with hedonic appreciation. However, difficulties are encountered when measuring complexity. The hypothesis of this study was that sensory descriptive analysis is an effective tool for deriving terms to measure adolescents' perception of complexity of pictures of fruit and vegetable mixes. A sensory panel evaluated 10 descriptive attributes, including simplicity and complexity, for 24 pictures of fruit and vegetable mixes. The descriptive analysis found strong inverse correlation between complexity and simplicity. An adolescent consumer group (n = 242) and an adult consumer group (n = 86) subsequently rated the pictures on simplicity and attractiveness. Pearson's correlation coefficients revealed strong correlations between the sensory panel and both consumer groups' usage of simplicity. This suggests that simplicity can be used to measure perceived complexity. In relation to attractiveness, different optimal levels of simplicity of pictures of fruit mixes were found for segments of the adolescent consumer group. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONSThese results potentially extend the applications of the sensory descriptive analysis procedure as it was found to be an effective tool to derive a term to measure adolescents' perception of complexity for pictures of food. This method can also be potentially extended to other types of stimuli. This method is thought to be extended to other situations where terms are needed to measure other consumer groups' perception of challenging parameters. For food practitioners, this gives new opportunities to measure important but challenging parameters.

Food Perception and Aesthetics - Linking Sensory Science to Culinary Practice

“…However, out of the fourteen papers that investigated the relationship between complexity and hedonic responses, only one paper found an inverted U-curve relationship as suggested by Berlyne's theory. This paper investigated only the complexity of visual images (Mielby, Jensen, Edelenbos, & Thybo, 2013), which depends on factors like the size and number of different products, the number of different colors, and the type of color contrasts (Mielby, Kildegaard, Gabrielsen, Edelenbos, & Thybo, 2012). The other studies observed either positive, negative, or no relationships.…”

Understanding Liking in Relation to Sensory Characteristics, Consumer Concept Associations, Arousal Potential and “Appropriateness for Use” Using Apple Juice as an Application

“…Among these attributes, the collative properties defined by Berlyne (1967) were found of particular interest to study as it is hypothesized that local foods, in comparison to mainstream products, might carry a high level of surprising elements and high levels of complexity which might influence consumer liking. Complexity is understood as the inverse of simplicity (Mielby et al 2013). The appropriateness for use attributes were defined from the situations the consumers mentioned during the recruitment.…”

Does food complexity have a role in eliciting expectations of satiating capacity?

“…Less work has been done on texture complexity (normally combined with flavor) (Bitnes, Ueland, Møller & Martens, 2009). For example, Weijzen, Zandstra, Alfieri & De Graaf (2008) selected four commercially available snacks which were "clearly different in taste and texture", and Mielby et al (2013) studied visual appearance complexity with mixed fruit images. Porcherot and Issanchou (1998), working with five experimental crackers varying in flavor but "identical in composition, shape and texture", asked consumers to score the crackers on a number of scales: Simple/Complex, Easy to describe/Difficult to describe, Composed of few ingredients/Composed of a lot of ingredients, and Mind few sensations/Mind a lot of sensations, among others.…”

“…Complexity is not an easily defined concept. According to Mielby, Jensen, Edelenbos & Thybo (2013), problems often arise when trying to measure perceived complexity, as it can be difficult to know what is actually measured, especially since defining complexity is a hard task. A large part of the research on food complexity deals with different flavor stimuli (Kroeze, 1990;Schifferstein, 1992;Sunarharum, Williams & Smyth, 2014).…”