6533b872fe1ef96bd12d3608

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Contribution à la caractérisation de la mémoire des aliments

subject

description

Memory plays a fundamental role in the acquisition of food likes and dislikes. As a consequence, a better understanding food memory will contribute to a better understanding food choice and behavior. This work sets out several experiments based on a common recognition paradigm: during a first session, participants are exposed to the food to be remembered (target) under conditions ensuring incidental learning. After a certain retention interval, participants are asked to recognize the target among a set of distractors with a flavor and/or a texture slightly different from the target. In line with previous works on food memory, three main results emerged from this work. First, participants of a food memory recognition test have a strong tendency to often answer “No, I did not eat that sample previously” to the recognition question, and memory performance relies more on rejection of the distractors than on recognition of the target. Second, food memory performance was associated with a high inter-individual variability, which could be partly explained by liking of the product. Last, within a given food, memory acuity differs across sensory dimensions: some are associated with better memory performance than others. Key-