Measuring Multisensory Imagery of Wine: the Vividness of Wine Imagery Questionnaire

Abstract

When we imagine objects or events, we often engage in multisensory mental imagery. Yet, investigations of mental imagery have typically focused on only one sensory modality — vision. One reason for this is that the most common tool for the measurement of imagery, the questionnaire, has been restricted to unimodal ratings of the object. We present a new mental imagery questionnaire that measures multisensory imagery. Specifically, the newly developed Vividness of Wine Imagery Questionnaire (VWIQ) measures mental imagery of wine in the visual, olfactory, and gustatory modalities. Wine is an ideal domain to explore multisensory imagery because wine drinking is a multisensory experience, it involves the neglected chemical senses (smell and taste), and provides the opportunity to explore the effect of experience and expertise on imagery (from wine novices to experts). The VWIQ questionnaire showed high internal consistency and reliability, and correlated with other validated measures of imagery. Overall, the VWIQ may serve as a useful tool to explore mental imagery for researchers, as well as individuals in the wine industry during sommelier training and evaluation of wine professionals.

Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine

“…We administered the Dutch version of the VWIQ (see Croijmans et al, 2019). The VWIQ is composed of six scenarios related to wine assessing the vividness of the imagined wine for color, smell, and taste; for example, “Imagine you are going to a short wine tasting where you will try different wines.…”

“…We began by first testing whether wine experts have more vivid imagery for the color, odor, and taste of wines than novices. To this end, we used the recently constructed and validated Vividness of Wine Imagery Questionnaire (VWIQ; Croijmans, Speed, Arshamian, & Majid, 2019). This questionnaire presents individuals with different scenes (e.g., a wine tasting, a dinner in a restaurant) that participants were instructed to imagine, and then to rate for vividness of the corresponding imagery of the featured wine.…”

Grounding language in the neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell

“…Furthermore, flavour encompasses almost all sensory modalities (Auvray & Spence, 2008;Shepherd, 2006), including the visual experience of food and drink consumed; the texture of it in our mouth (mouth-feel); the temperature, etc. The multisensory nature of flavour elucidates why flavour imagery is often rated as more vivid than odour imagery (Andrade et al, 2014;Croijmans, Speed, Arshamian, & Majid, 2019). One might predict, therefore, that flavour-related language is also easier to mentally simulate.…”

I Am Conscious, Therefore, I Am: Imagery, Affect, Action, and a General Theory of Behavior

“…Mental imagery is ideally suited to these purposes by providing preparatory images, which can exist in any sensory modality; however, for the majority of people, this is predominantly visual. On the other hand, imagining the smell and taste of a delicious meal, “hearing” the sound of some enchanting music, and imagining scenes and feelings of relaxation from a recent holiday, or, indeed, “tasting” a delicious glass of wine are all equally possible [55]. Anomalous and paranormal experiences are reported at significantly higher rates among people with vivid VVIQ scores, especially auras, remote healing, and apparitions, but only among high vivid scorers in the open-eyes condition [56].…”