Stevenson Richard J, Mahmut Mehmet
Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW2109, Australia,
Psychon Bull Rev. 2015 Aug;22(4):955-60. doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0785-0.
When participants perceive flavor they do not recognise the role of smell. We examined two possible accounts of why: (1) a common attentional channel activated by taste; and (2) prior learning between taste and smell. Participants were asked to sniff food-related odors with a fluid in their mouth and profile each odor after expectorating. This process was later repeated for each odor, with some odors experienced with water on both occasions, and others with water on one occasion and sucrose (weak or strong) on the other. We investigated how reliable these odor profiles were and whether they were influenced by prior odor-taste learning (indexed by odor sweetness). For non-sweet smells, the presence of a tastant significantly improved profile reliability relative to water in the mouth. For sweet smells, tastant had no effect, which we suggest represents a cancelling out of the beneficial effects of the common attentional channel by the detrimental effects of prior learning. Thus, both mechanisms may contribute to masking the modal identity of smell thereby contributing to flavor binding.
当参与者感知味道时，他们并未意识到嗅觉的作用。我们研究了造成这种情况的两种可能原因：（1）由味觉激活的共同注意力通道；（2）味觉与嗅觉之间的先前学习。要求参与者嘴里含着液体时嗅闻与食物相关的气味，并在咳出液体后描述每种气味。这个过程后来针对每种气味重复进行，有些气味在两种情况下都与水一起体验，而其他气味在一种情况下与水一起体验，在另一种情况下与蔗糖（弱或强）一起体验。我们研究了这些气味描述的可靠性如何，以及它们是否受到先前气味 - 味觉学习（以气味甜度为指标）的影响。对于非甜味气味，相对于口中含水，味觉物质的存在显著提高了描述的可靠性。对于甜味气味，味觉物质没有影响，我们认为这代表了先前学习的不利影响抵消了共同注意力通道的有益影响。因此，这两种机制都可能有助于掩盖嗅觉的模态身份，从而促进味道的结合。
