6533b83afe1ef96bd12a7865

RESEARCH PRODUCT

REPLICATED TRIANGLE TESTS: EFFECT OF FEED-BACK AND PRODUCT COMPARISON ON PERFORMANCE

subject

description

The feed-back procedure consists of informing assessors of the quality of their response (correct or incorrect) after each triangle test. This procedure showed a contrasted effect according to assessors' detection abilities. A decrease in performance was observed for assessors who had low detection abilities whereas a slight increase was observed for assessors who had higher detection abilities. When the feed-back procedure is followed by a comparison by tasting of the two products, the increase in performance from the beginning to the end of the session is larger than that of both feed-back and control (no information) groups. We suggest that information inference from previous tests, which allows assessors to perform better at subsequent tests, is facilitated by the presence of a double information (feed-back and product comparison). This effect might be due to an attentional process allowing assessors to focus their attention on the difference between the two products. An attempt was made to model learning effect by variation of attentional weights.