Measurement of implicit food memory: advances and difficulties
Résumé
In everyday life, sensory characteristics of foods are learned in a non-intentional way and recollection of these memorized characteristics are usually implicit. That raises the question of the ecological validity of usual laboratory experiments used to test sensory and more specifically odour memory. A first approach to assess implicit recollection of odours relies on priming paradigms. In such paradigms, memory is demonstrated if the performance on a target task is greater for primed stimuli than for non-primed stimuli. Different target tasks were used but none of them were completely satisfactory. The second approach relies on associative learning. Degel and Köster (1998) successfully demonstrated implicitly learned association between an odour and a place. However, the transposition of this method to food is difficult to achieve. We attempted to evaluate the change of sensory expectations induced by a visual cue associated during learning to a specific flavour or texture characteristic. Limits of this approach will be discussed.