Understanding Freshness Perception from the Cognitive Mechanisms of Flavor: The Case of Beverages

Abstract

Freshness perception has received recent consideration in the field of consumer science mainly because of its hedonic dimension, which is assumed to influence consumers’ preference and behavior. However, most studies have considered freshness as a multisensory attribute of food and beverage products without investigating the cognitive mechanisms at hand. In the present review, we endorse a slightly different perspective on freshness. We focus on (i) the multisensory integration processes that underpin freshness perception, and (ii) the top–down factors that influence the explicit attribution of freshness to a product by consumers. To do so, we exploit the recent literature on the cognitive underpinnings of flavor perception as a heuristic to better characterize the mechanisms of freshness perception in the particular case of beverages. We argue that the lack of consideration of particular instances of flavor, such as freshness, has resulted in a lack of consensus about the content and structure of different types of flavor representations. We then enrich these theoretical analyses, with a review of the cognitive mechanisms of flavor perception: from multisensory integration processes to the influence of top–down factors (e.g., attentional and semantic). We conclude that similarly to flavor, freshness perception is characterized by hybrid content, both perceptual and semantic, but that freshness has a higher-degree of specificity than flavor. In particular, contrary to flavor, freshness is characterized by specific functions (e.g., alleviation of oropharyngeal symptoms) and likely differs from flavor with respect to the weighting of each sensory contributor, as well as to its subjective location. Finally, we provide a comprehensive model of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie freshness perception. This model paves the way for further empirical research on particular instances of flavor, and will enable advances in the field of food and beverage cognition.

Audiovisual Crossmodal Correspondence between Bubbles’ Size and Pouring Sounds’ Pitch in Carbonated Beverages

“…Whether any semantic overlap between the freshness prime and the target stimuli used in our study is large enough to cause a semantic congruency effect remains to be investigated. The ambiguous and heterogeneous meaning of freshness among people [31][32][33] might have reduced the ability to obtain semantic congruency effects when the word "freshness" was used as a semantic prime. Regarding response recordings, studies have shown that the response window procedure can help controlling speed-accuracy trade-off effects by reducing variances in the response latencies [30].…”

The influence of audiovisual stimuli cuing temperature, carbonation, and color on the categorization of freshness in beverages

“…Another interesting follow‐up in real consumption context would be to investigate the influence of ambient temperature during the consumers’ freshness evaluation of beverages while modifying the products’ temperature and color (see Motoki, Saito, Nouchi, Kawashima, & Sugiura, who have shown that ambient warm temperature decreases the preference for savory foods). Modulating the ambient temperature might also enable researchers to understand the mechanisms that lead some populations living in warm countries to consider hot beverages (e.g., hot mint tea in North Africa) as fresh or refreshing (see Roque et al, for the distinction between these two concepts). In addition, it might be interesting in future research to investigate if the color of the liquid plays a bigger role in modulating freshness perception for hot as compared to cold beverages.…”

“…Over the past decade, the perception of freshness has received consideration in consumer studies since it is generally perceived as pleasurable by consumers and it thus may be expected to influence their purchase and consumption behavior (see Eccles, Du‐Plessis, Dommels, & Wilkinson, ; Labbe et al, ; Roque, Auvray, & Lafraire, , for reviews). Considering the particular case of beverages, it should be noted that the concept of freshness may convey different meanings because it can refer to: (a) the overall multisensory experience during a drinking episode (involving for instance coldness, sourness, or a menthol odor that will contribute to an actual perception of freshness, but also some visual cues for instance, that may trigger freshness expectations), (b) the aging of the organic ingredients contained in the drink (e.g., aging of the mint leaves in a mojito), or else (c) the time delay (informed and/or perceived) to which the drink has been prepared before being served.…”

“…Hence, it is challenging to disentangle behaviorally the distinct, though likely related, meanings of freshness since the three meanings reported above may well overlap. Based on previous research (see Labbe, Almiron‐Roig, et al, ; Roque et al, for reviews), it appears that the multisensory experience of freshness is likely built from two fundamental cognitive mechanisms that include: (a) expectations elicited by visual, auditory, and orthonasal olfactory cues for which a product can be perceived as fresh, before tasting, and (b) actual sensations elicited by gustatory and olfactory cues, as well as peripheral nervous systems including oral‐somatosensory, nociceptive, and tactile cues contributing to the perception of freshness itself during tasting. As a first investigation of the crossmodal interaction effects that likely influence the categorization of particular beverages as being fresh, we chose to focus in this study on visual and auditory cues that may generate expectations of freshness.…”

“…The existence of specific crossmodal correspondences are often inferred from participants’ reaction times (RTs) using speeded classification tasks, including variants of the Implicit Association Test to determine the strength of the association between two perceptual features (e.g., Demattè, Sanabria, & Spence, ; Deroy, Fasiello, Hayward, & Auvray, ; Parise & Spence, ). This test is based on the rationale that when two stimuli share a strong association (i.e., congruent versus incongruent associations, see Roque et al, ), participants’ RTs are shorter and their responses tend to be more accurate. More straightforward speeded classification tasks are also often used to investigate interaction effects between different perceptual features (e.g., Evans & Treisman, ; Marks, ).…”