Summary: What can cognitive psychology and sensory evaluation
learn from each other?
The University of Texas at Dallas, PO Box 830688, Richardson, TX 75083 0688, USA
Two questions are addressed in this paper: What can cognitive psychology bring to sensory evaluation? And what can cognitive
psychology learn from sensory evaluation? In the first part, I will argue that one important contribution from psychology to sensory
evaluation is to interpret flavor as a cognitively unified system made of three anatomically separated systems (smell, taste, and the
trigeminal system). In the second part, I will argue that the applied field of sensory evaluation stresses the importance of using
ecologically valid, naturalistic stimuli. Sensory evaluation also provides results that challenge accepted interpretations in psychol-
ogy, especially in the field of evaluation of expertise.
# 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Cognition; Cognitive psychology; Expertise; Face processing; Flavor; Halo-dumping; Odor; Odor/taste interaction; Olfaction; Orbito-
frontal cortex; Sensory evaluation; Sensory integration; Smell; Synesthesia; Taste; Trigeminal system
Cognitive psychology, or more broadly cognitive
science, aims to understand how people or machines
acquire, store, retrieve, and use knowledge and informa-
tion. Sensory evaluation analyzes how food products are
perceived (see, e.g., Lawless & Heymann, 1999). Given