The chemistry of food includes substances that activate chemosensory, somatosensory, and visual receptors located at the periphery of the nervous system, e.g. in odor, taste, touch, and light sensitive cells. These cells originate signals that travel to different parts of the brain creating recognizably different sensations. Furthermore, these sensations combine to create judgments of a foods identity, valance (pleasantness), and hedonics (liking) shaping a consumer's expectations and attitudes toward the food (Deliza and MacFie 1996; Garber et al. 2001). Flavor is the total of these experiences. Although the rules that governs how the sensory modes are summed to express flavor remains a mystery, there are indications that the rules are complex and profound. For example, several sensory studies have shown that the odor descriptors used for white wines are replaced by those used to describe red wines when subjects taste white wine colored red. This paper will review our present knowledge of cross-modal interactions between odor and vision and describe results from studies of the effects of odor-vision congruency on the detection of pure odorants.

Painting flavor:  The modulation of odor perception by vision

245th National Meeting (2013)

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