Does Blind Tasting Work? Investigating the Impact of Training on Blind Tasting Accuracy and Wine Preference

Wang, Qian Janice; Prešern, Domen

doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.36

Cited by 14 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This finding relates to a suggestion made by Valentin et al (2007) that beer training influences recognition memory, rather than necessarily enhancing perceptual processes, and may explain why participants commonly fail to generalise their learning to new beers. This contrasts with some research demonstrating that wine training dramatically improves people's ability to detect grape varieties (see Solomon, 1997), but is consistent with other findings in this field showing that training has little influence on taste and olfactory abilities (Wang, Prešern, Fermandes, & Fjaeldstad, 2019;Wang, & Prešern, 2018). The evidence presented here suggests that training allows people to recognise beers, but does not allow them to be able to generalise sufficiently to categorise them.…”

Section: The Effects Of Beer Trainingsupporting

confidence: 78%

The influence of training and expertise on the multisensory perception of beer: A review

Doorn

Watson

Timora

et al. 2020

Food Quality and Preference

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This review critically evaluates the literature documenting the impact of training on people's perception of beer. In certain circumstances, training has been shown to improve people's ability to match and identify beers, and to discriminate between beers and between the distinctive attributes of beer. However, a reasonably consistent finding is that the benefits of beer training do not seem to generalise to novel beers (i.e., those not experienced during training). As such, training would appear to improve the capacity to label perception and/or people's recognition memory for beers, rather than necessarily influencing perception itself. Given how much beer is consumed annually, it is surprising that there has not been more published research into the role that training plays in this particular beverage category. Part of the reason for this may relate to (a) the limited role of experts in this field (e.g., primarily restricted to product testing and quality control; as compared to their much more prominent role in the world of wine), (b) the fact that training is an expensive and time-consuming process, and (c) it is wrongly assumed that the effects of training are similar across different beverage categories (e.g., beer and wine). We suggest that further efforts are therefore required before it will be possible to confidently conclude that training lowers the perceptual thresholds, and enhances the perceptual discrimination abilities, of beer experts above those of novices.

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Section: The Effects Of Beer Trainingsupporting

confidence: 78%

The influence of training and expertise on the multisensory perception of beer: A review

Doorn

Watson

Timora

et al. 2020

Food Quality and Preference

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“…For example, a study with naïve participants who engage in a training procedure similar to that employed by Tempere, Cuzange, Bougeant, Revel, and Sicard (2012) or alternatively with blind‐taste training (cf. Wang & Prešern, 2018) could explore the effect of interference of imagined smells on the recognition of learned odors (similar to Djordjevic, 2004; Djordjevic et al, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine

Croijmans

Speed²,

Arshamian

et al. 2020

Cognitive Science

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Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain-specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses.

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“…Solomon (1997, Experiment 4) reported PERCEPTUAL LEARNING IN THE CHEMICAL SENSES 12 that experts used an average of five flavour terms whereas intermediates and novices used an average of only 3.1 descriptors. And, more recently, Wang and Prešern (2018) found that experienced wine tasters wrote significantly longer tasting notes (23% longer, on average), than did the novices whom they assessed. Elsewhere, it has been reported that wine experts use more pertinent wine descriptors (Zucco et al, 2011) and, what is more, show a higher degree of consensuality in the terms that they choose to use (Croijmans & Majid, 2016) than do nonexperts.…”

Section: Cognitive / Descriptive Changes In Wine Expertsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…What is more, research in this area is made all the more confusing as certain authors talk about perceptual learning while actually using a cross-sectional comparison of experts and non-experts. For example, just take approach to the study of perceptual learning has involved measuring the effects of training on, for example, a wine-taster's chemosensory abilities (e.g., Tempere et al, 2012;Walk, 1966;Wang & Prešern, 2018). We will look at the strengths and weakness of each of these approaches in turn.…”

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confidence: 99%

Perceptual learning in the chemical senses: A review

Spence

2019

Food Research International

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People have been writing about perceptual learning and expertise in the chemical senses for more than a century now, with a particular focus on the world of wine. However, the problem with many of the cross-sectional studies of wine expertise that have been published to date is that they simply cannot rule out the possibility that those with superior chemosensory abilities end-up gravitating toward a career in wine. Definitions of expertise also tend to vary widely between studies, making direct comparison of the results obtained rather difficult. By contrast, the longitudinal learning studies that have been published have typically only assessed the effects of relatively small amounts of training. And, taken as a whole, the majority of studies in this area tend to look statistically underpowered nowadays in terms of the sample sizes that have been used. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, the literature converges on the conclusion that chemosensory perceptual learning does occur, though the gains (e.g., in terms of lower detection thresholds) are usually modest at best, and tend to be highly stimulusspecific. By contrast, cognitive/semantic improvements in describing/discriminating wines, and wine-relevant compounds, as well as the acquisition of relevant conceptual knowledge, are much more salient differentiators in the cross-sectional empirical literature. Enhanced attention and olfactory recognition memory abilities have also been reported amongst wine experts. Looking to the future, the hope is that the insights garnered from studies of perceptual learning in the higher spatial senses may help to optimize the training regimes for those wishing to enhance their wine-tasting abilities, and perhaps also aid recovery in those suffering from olfactory loss.

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Does Blind Tasting Work? Investigating the Impact of Training on Blind Tasting Accuracy and Wine Preference

Cited by 14 publications

References 15 publications

The influence of training and expertise on the multisensory perception of beer: A review

The influence of training and expertise on the multisensory perception of beer: A review

Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine

Perceptual learning in the chemical senses: A review

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