Food Experience and Sensory Testing (Feast) Lab, Massey University, Palmerston North 4410, New Zealand.
Food Experience and Sensory Testing (Feast) Lab, Massey University, Palmerston North 4410, New Zealand; Riddet Institute, Massey University, Palmerston North 4410, New Zealand.
Food Res Int. 2021 Dec;150(Pt B):110804. doi: 10.1016/j.foodres.2021.110804. Epub 2021 Nov 9.
The environments and/or contexts typically used to determine consumer affective and sensory responses have been questioned for their ecological validity. However, conducting consumer testing in real-life scenarios is costly, logistically complex, and hard to standardise between participants due to a lack of control over external cues and product preparation. Immersive environments, representative of product consumption contexts, may provide more ecologically valid data. Recently, digital immersion technologies have been proposed to contextualise consumer studies whilst maintaining experimental control. This narrative review summarised published consumer studies including digital immersion in addition to traditional sensory booths and/or a real-life immersive contexts in their study design, to measure the impact of these contexts on liking, emotional response and intensity of sensory attributes. The findings suggest that emotional response ratings are more comparable to real-life, and that consumer engagement and reliability increases, when testing is conducted using digital immersive techniques compared to traditional sensory booths. Therefore, digital immersive techniques look promising to improve ecological validity of consumer testing, but further development and research is required.
用于确定消费者情感和感官反应的环境和/或背景已经因其生态有效性而受到质疑。然而，由于无法控制外部提示和产品准备，在真实场景中进行消费者测试既昂贵又复杂，并且难以在参与者之间标准化。沉浸式环境，代表产品消费环境，可能会提供更具生态有效性的数据。最近，数字沉浸式技术已经被提出，以在保持实验控制的同时使消费者研究情境化。本叙述性评论总结了已发表的消费者研究，包括数字沉浸式研究，以及传统感官展位和/或真实生活沉浸式环境在其研究设计中的应用，以衡量这些环境对喜好、情感反应和感官属性强度的影响。研究结果表明，与传统的感官展位相比，使用数字沉浸式技术进行测试时，情感反应评分更接近真实生活，并且消费者的参与度和可靠性更高。因此，数字沉浸式技术似乎有望提高消费者测试的生态有效性，但需要进一步的开发和研究。
