Sensory memory and food texture

Memory for texture plays an important role in food expectations. After fasting overnight, subjects (41 women, 35 men, age 19–60 years) received a breakfast including breakfast drink, biscuits and yoghurt. Subsequently, they rated their hunger feelings every hour, and returned for a taste experiment in the evening. When unexpectedly confronted with five texture variations of each breakfast item, they were asked to recognise the samples they had eaten earlier. Signal detection showed that subjects could recognise the drinks and yoghurts, but not the biscuits. In a second test with newly coded samples, subjects rated liking and compared their perception of the sample with the remembered target on different attributes. Memory was not related to liking and it was poor for fat (biscuits and yoghurt), but good for thickness (drinks and yoghurt) and crispiness (biscuits). Levels of fat were not remembered as such, but showed some indirect distinctiveness in related attributes as crispiness, thickness or crumbling (biscuits) and thickness or creaminess (yoghurt).