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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Distinguishing between two crus : as easy as picking the right side ? : Effect of expertise on conceptual and perceptual representations of Beaujolais wines

subject

description

Expertise was studied in cognitive psychology in order to understand the psychological mechanisms and the abilities involved in various areas of expertise. In the wine field, the few studies conducted on expertise suggest that the knowledge representation of experts is organized around “prototypes” derived from wines of different colours or grape varieties. The general purpose of this thesis was to address 1) theoretical questions about knowledge representation of wines among experts and novices, and 2) wine industry questions about Beaujolais wine perceptions. To this end, the effect of expertise on knowledge representations of wines was evaluated by comparing the performance of three different panels (experts, familiar novices and unfamiliar novices). In a first section, the hierarchical organization of knowledge was studied, and compared to the wine classification system. To this end, a free hierarchical sorting task was conducted on wine labels from different grape varieties, vineyards and appellations. Additional interviews allowed us to identify the criteria and the strategies used by panelists.In a second section, the transcribed interviews were analyzed by textual analysis in order to provide additional information about the wine representations of the different panels.In a third section, the conceptual and the perceptual wine representations of panelists were compared at different levels of abstraction going from the more general to the more specific (grape variety, appellation and lieu-dit) were compared. A binary sorting task was conducted for each level of abstraction using wines and labels of the same wines as stimuli.