Food Tastes Better If You Look At It Before You Smell It

By Emily Reynolds Smell is often considered to be a particularly evocative sense: if you haven’t yourself been transported back in time by a nostalgic scent then you’ll almost certainly be familiar with the phenomenon via reference to the famous Proustian rush. Scent is also increasingly being used in marketing, with some evidence suggesting that smell can influence consumers’ judgements and decisions. A new study, published in the Journal for Consumer Psychology, takes a closer look at how smell interacts with other senses to influence our perceptions. The team, led by the University of South Florida’s Dipayan Biswas, finds that looking at food before smelling it may enhance our enjoyment of what we eat.  In the first study, 198 students were split into four conditions. In all conditions, five pieces of a red strawberry-flavoured fruit snack were placed in front of participants inside an opaque envelope. In the first condition, participants smelled the snack first before looking inside the envelope; in the second, participants looked at the snack before smelling it; and in the final two conditions, participants were instructed to either only smell or only look at the snack. All participants then rated the expected taste of the snack, as well as describing its smell and colour. They were then allowed to eat the fruit snack, and rated their perception of the actual taste and how much they liked it. Finally, they stated whether or not they would recomm...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Eating Smell Source Type: blogs