The nose is hungrier than the eyes
- PDF / 381,684 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 104 Downloads / 242 Views
BRIEF REPORT
The nose is hungrier than the eyes Karina Chan 1 & Richard J. Stevenson 1 & Heather Francis 1 Accepted: 31 October 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Vision and olfaction are the main sensory channels for appraising food prior to eating. Motivational models often assume that these sensory channels function in an equivalent manner. We tested this notion by asking participants to rate their desire for some snacks only via smell and others only via vision. In the next phase, participants consumed a small sample of every snack, now with all of the senses available, rating liking and desire for more. After consuming a meal, participants repeated the desire/liking test. Sensing via olfaction, relative to vision, led to greater desire ratings irrespective of state. When hungry, judgments of liking and desire for more were higher for foods that were initially smelled relative to those that were initially seen. Across the meal, visually based desire ratings declined more than those based on smell, relative to ratings made when the snacks were tasted. Together, this suggests motivational equivalence does not hold for olfaction and vision. We suggest this may be due to a greater reliance on memory for generating visually based desire. Keywords Desire . Motivation . Olfaction . Pleasure
Decisions about whether or not to eat rely on two main sensory channels—vision and olfaction (Stevenson, 2009). Food is seen in advertisements, on packaging, and on the plate, and it is smelled when passing a bakery or restaurant, during cooking, and when it is served. These senses, alone or in combination, can result in desire, with this moderated both by physiological state (i.e., hungry vs. sated) and by many psychological variables (e.g., dieting, food preferences; e.g., Hofmann & Van Dillen, 2012; Kavanagh, Andrade, & May, 2005). Desire and its moderating variables have been studied in some detail (e.g., Hofmann & Van Dillen, 2012). This is because appetitive control seems easily overwhelmed by the modern food environment, with its frequent encounters with palatable food, often resulting in overeating, weight gain, and obesity (e.g., Redden & Haws, 2013). There is, however, a key part of food desire that we know little about—namely, the role of each sensory channel in its formation. Two related assumptions are often made in this regard. First, that these channels are motivationally equivalent, with each being as
* Richard J. Stevenson [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW2109, Australia
good as the other in generating desire (e.g., Jones et al., 2018; Kavanagh et al., 2005). Second, that desire resulting from different sensory channels is similarly moderated by physiological state (e.g., Berridge, 1996; Cabanac, 1992). That is hunger/fullness should exert the same effect on food desire, irrespective of the sensory channel from which it arises. Our aim is to test whether these related assumptions are correct. If, for a given stimulus, smelling produced more
Data Loading...
