Dissociable effects of hunger, exposure and sensory overlap on flavour liking

•Perceived flavour pleasantness gradually increases with increasing overlap of taste and odour components during hunger and satiety.•Additive hunger effects on pleasantness emerge only after correcting for prior exposure.•Metabolic rather than sensory mechanisms explain hunger effects.•Capitalising on these synergies between determinants of hedonic value may facilitate dietary change and adaptation to new foods. The hedonic value of a flavour stimulus is shaped by familiarity with the combination of its sensory components and the perceiver’s metabolic state. While the relationship between these processes has important implications for understanding food acceptance, interactions between them and their potential specificity to the specific sensory features of the food consumed remain to be defined. In two preregistered experiments, we combined a sensory dilution series with a metabolic state modulation to examine whether hunger affected perceived flavour pleasantness across different levels of sensory concordance. Both experiments consisted of two sessions, whereby healthy participants evaluated the pleasantness of olfactory-gustatory stimuli – once while sated from a standardised meal and once while hungry. Experiment I demonstrated that perceived congruence of odour and taste strongly predicted flavour pleasantness, with no significant additive or interactive hunger effects. Experiment II replicated these results with a larger sample and found no sensory specific modulation of pleasantness. Importantly, exploratory analyses on data from Experiment II indicated that hunger effects were partially counteracted by interactions with prior exposure, where pleasantness enhancement through hunger was stronger for initial exposure under sated conditions. Pre-registered confirmatory analyses replicated this effect on the independent dataset from Experiment I. No interactions between sensory concordance and metabolic state were observed. Our findings demonstrate a robust effect of sensory concordance on pleasantness across metabolic states. Additive pleasantness enhancement by hunger is vulnerable to learning by prior exposure. Synergies between these determinants of hedonic value provide novel insights into strategies for dietary change which merit further investigation.