13 - Temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) as a sensory profiling technique

Abstract

Temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) is a relatively recent method in the sensory field aiming at collecting the sequence of the dominant sensations perceived by the subject during the tasting of a product. For instance, while tasting a piece of chocolate from intake to swallowing, the subject can successively perceive the attributes crunchy, cocoa, fat, cocoa again and melting as the dominant sensations. Since the first communication presenting the method in 2003, many developments have been proposed to define adequate protocols, propose dedicated statistical analyses and interpretations, and even extend the TDS approach to a larger scope. This chapter first introduces the TDS method and its specificities, and describes how to set up a TDS experiment before exploring the analysis part and providing some examples of applications.