Do trained assessors generalize their knowledge to new stimuli?

Previous work showed that trained assessors are better at discriminating and describing familiar chemico-sensorial stimuli than novices. In this study, we evaluated whether this superiority holds true for new stimuli. We first trained a group of subjects to characterize beer flavors over a two year period. After training was accomplished, we compared the performance of these trained assessors with the performance of novice subjects for discrimination and matching tasks. The tasks were performed using both well-learned and new beers. Trained assessors outperformed novices in the discrimination task for learned beers but not for new beers. But on the matching task, trained assessors outperfor…

Sort and beer: Everything you wanted to know about the sorting task but did not dare to ask

author cannot archive publisher's version/PDF; International audience; In industries, the sensory characteristics of products are key points to control. The method commonly used to characterize and describe products is the conventional profile. This very efficient method requires a lot of time to train assessors and to teach them how to quantify the sensory characteristics of interest. Over the last few years, other faster and less restricting methods have been developed, such as free choice profile, flash profile, projective mapping or sorting tasks. Among these methods, the sorting task has recently become quite popular in sensory evaluation because of its simplicity: it only requires ass…

Do spices have the same odor on the other side of world ? effect of culture on spice odor perception

International audience; Culture is known to affect people’s ability to identify or describe everyday odors (Chrea et al, 2005). For example, Vietnamese students are better at identifying the odor of ginger than French students who are better at identifying the odor of blackcurrant. Familiarity has been suggested as a factor underlying this effect. The goal of this study was to evaluate further this interpretation and to explore its role in the perception of spices in France and Thailand. We evaluated if food habits link to a given culture (e.g. eating curry) would impact individuals’ ability to identify (verbal task) or recognize (perceptual task) odors presented alone or in mixtures. Six s…

Becoming a beer expert: is simple exposure with feedback sufficient to learn beer categories?

Category learning is an important aspect of expertise development which had been little studied in the chemosensory field. The wine literature suggests that through repeated exposure to wines, sensory information is stored by experts as prototypes. The goal of this study was to further explore this issue using beers. We tested the ability of beer consumers to correctly categorize beers from two different categories (top- and bottom-fermented beers) before and after repeated exposure with feedback to beers from these categories. We found that participants learned to identify the category membership of beers to which they have been exposed but were unable to generalize their learning to other…

Quick and dirty but still pretty good: a review of new descriptive methods in food science

Summary For food scientists and industrials, descriptive profiling is an essential tool that involves the evaluation of both the qualitative and quantitative sensory characteristics of a product by a panel. Recently, in response to industrial demands to develop faster and more cost-effective methods of descriptive analysis, several methods have been offered as alternatives to conventional profiling. These methods can be classified in three families: (i) verbal-based methods (flash profile and check-all-that-apply), (ii) similarity-based methods (free sorting task and projective mapping aka Napping®) and (iii) reference-based methods (polarised sensory positioning and pivot profile). We succ…

Free Hierarchical Sorting procedure: towards a better understanding of assessor’s perception?

International audience; Interviews results highlight that expert and familiar consumer panels use top-down strategies (use of concepts, knowledge) while unfamiliar consumer panel use bottom-up strategies (use of perceptions). So, for familiar consumer panel, the exposure and the familiarity to these wines contributed to the use of similar categorization processes than expert panel.➢ Conducting interviews at the end of sorting tasks provides additional informations on categorization strategies and thus a better understanding of assessor’s perception.

Méthodes descriptives alternatives

Impact of training on beer flavor perception and description: Are trained and untrained subjects really different?

This study examines the effect of beer assessment training on verbal and nonverbal performance. Two groups of subjects are asked to sort, match, and describe a set of 12 beers (6 supplemented and 6 commercial beers). Subjects from the first group are enrolled in a beer-training program. Subjects in the second group are untrained beer consumers. Results show that although both groups perform the matching task equally well, trained subjects performed better on supplemented beers and untrained subjects on commercial beers. Examination of the generated vocabulary shows that 44% of the terms are common to trained and untrained subjects. However, an analysis of the terms' efficiency shows that wh…

Analyzing assessors and products in sorting tasks: DISTATIS, theory and applications

Abstract In this paper we present a new method called distatis that can be applied to the analysis of sorting data. D istatis is a generalization of classical multidimensional scaling which allows one to analyze 3-ways distance tables. When used for analyzing sorting tasks, distatis takes into account individual sorting data. Specifically, when distatis is used to analyze the results of an experiment in which several assessors sort a set of products, we obtain two types of maps: One for the assessors and one for the products. In these maps, the proximity between two points reflects their similarity, and therefore these maps can be read using the same rules as standard metric multidimensiona…

Expertise and memory for beers and beer olfactory compounds

Abstract Do beer experts have better recognition memory for beers than novices? And can recognition memory for beers be predicted on the basis of recognition memory for beer odor compounds? We compared the memory performance of “beer experts” and novices in two recognition tasks. The first task was performed ortho- and retronasally with beers, and the second orthonasally with beer odor compounds. As a control we also compared the performance of “experts” and novices on an identification task and a same/different discrimination task. “Beer experts” outperformed novices in both the identification task and the recognition memory task with both beers and odor compounds, but only for beers they …

Impact of training on strategies to realize a beer sorting task: behavioral and verbal assessments

What is the validity of the sorting task for describing beers? A study using trained and untrained assessors

In the sensory evaluation literature, it has been suggested that sorting tasks followed by a description of the groups of products can be used by consumers to describe products, but a closer look at this literature suggests that this claim needs to be evaluated. In this paper, we proposed to examine the validity of the sorting task to describe products by trained and untrained assessors. The experiment reported here consisted in two parts. In a first part, participants sorted nine commercial beers and then described each group with their own words or with a list of terms. In a second part, participants were asked to match each beer with one of their own sets of descriptors. The matching tas…

How to measure the drinking experience of beer to drive new product development

International audience; Consumers interact with products using three mental systems: affects, senses, and cognition. These systems give rise to“consumer experience”. Two studies were conducted to measure the experience of drinking craft and industrial beers. The firststudy consisted in an online survey with 75 consumers whose goal was to select phrases related to each system. A set of 18phrases was selected to perform the second study in which consumers had to drink industrial beers, rate liking and selectphrases that best described their experience of drinking in a CATA list. CATA phrases were related to the affective, sensory orcognitive systems. Beers were rated similar in liking, howeve…