Abstract
Freshness perception has received recent consideration in the field of consumer science mainly because of its hedonic dimension, which is assumed to influence consumers’ preference and behavior. However, most studies have considered freshness as a multisensory attribute of food and beverage products without investigating the cognitive mechanisms at hand. In the present review, we endorse a slightly different perspective on freshness. We focus on (i) the multisensory integration processes that underpin freshness perception, and (ii) the top–down factors that influence the explicit attribution of freshness to a product by consumers. To do so, we exploit the recent literature on the cognitive underpinnings of flavor perception as a heuristic to better characterize the mechanisms of freshness perception in the particular case of beverages. We argue that the lack of consideration of particular instances of flavor, such as freshness, has resulted in a lack of consensus about the content and structure of different types of flavor representations. We then enrich these theoretical analyses, with a review of the cognitive mechanisms of flavor perception: from multisensory integration processes to the influence of top–down factors (e.g., attentional and semantic). We conclude that similarly to flavor, freshness perception is characterized by hybrid content, both perceptual and semantic, but that freshness has a higher-degree of specificity than flavor. In particular, contrary to flavor, freshness is characterized by specific functions (e.g., alleviation of oropharyngeal symptoms) and likely differs from flavor with respect to the weighting of each sensory contributor, as well as to its subjective location. Finally, we provide a comprehensive model of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie freshness perception. This model paves the way for further empirical research on particular instances of flavor, and will enable advances in the field of food and beverage cognition.
Highlights
The perceived freshness of food and beverages has been generally considered as the result of several sensory contributions: olfactory, gustatory, tactile, trigeminal, visual, and auditory (Westerink and Kozlov, 2003; Labbe et al, 2009a,b; Saint-Eve et al, 2010)
The present review aimed at exploiting the existing literature on flavor to characterize the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the multisensory perception of freshness, in the case of beverages
We have hypothesized that some questions about flavor remained open until now because flavor is a generic term, and in some circumstances its genericity blurs the representational nature of particular instances of flavor such as freshness, as well as the corresponding cognitive mechanisms at hand
Summary
The perceived freshness of food and beverages has been generally considered as the result of several sensory contributions: olfactory, gustatory, tactile, trigeminal, visual, and auditory (Westerink and Kozlov, 2003; Labbe et al, 2009a,b; Saint-Eve et al, 2010). We address the concept of freshness instead of refreshing because the term refreshing is more directed toward the post-consumption phase, together with the impact fresh beverages have on arousal or thirst-quenching sensation (Labbe et al, 2009a). This conceptual clarification will allow us to move to the central question of the present review which is the characterization of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the experience of freshness. The particular conditions that influence the degree of integration of a multisensory perception, such as congruency and the unity assumption (see Section “Particular Conditions that Influence the Degree of Integration”), will be reviewed This will allow us to build a preliminary model of freshness perception and provide specific empirical research hypotheses about the putative crossmodal interactions and correspondences that influence the experience of freshness
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