Dumping effects measured in cream cakes: influence of response alternatives

Sensory panellists are often asked to make intensity judgments for a sensory attribute of a stimulus. However, it is well known that a multidimensional stimulus entails this judgment, and could lead to a carryover effect of the intensity of sensations as a function of the number of available attributes. This phenomenon has been called the “dumping” effect and could especially appear as a methodological issue in cross-modal interactions studies. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of the number of attributes on the rating of a target attribute (saltiness) of several variants of a food-product and to assess the extent to which dumping affect judgment between variants. Nine …