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Project properties |
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| Title | How do we start to like or dislike what we smell? |
| Group | Human Nutrition and Health |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 36 |
| Supervisor(s) | Sanne Boesveldt |
| Examiner(s) | prof. CG (Ciaran) Forde |
| Contact info | sanne.boesveldt@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2023/09/01 |
| End date | |
| Description | Associative learning, the process by which one event or item comes to be linked to another through experience, is critically involved in human cognition and behavior. Moreover, associative learning principles can explain responses to food products. This may be the case when you dislike mussels because you associate the taste with the first time you ever ate them and became ill. Furthermore, repeated exposure to a food product can be compared to appetitive or aversive conditioning, in that a subject’s response to a food product may change over time towards liking or dislike as a result of experience. Think of your first beer ever which did not taste well, but because you stubbornly kept drinking you slowly start to appreciate its effects and taste. Thus, besides sensory properties, previous experience greatly determines liking and wanting for food products, and therefore plays an important role in shaping eating behavior.
The present project will examine and manipulate the processes that determine our preferences, by developing and testing an olfactory conditioning model to study changes in olfactory hedonics of a novel odor after repeated exposure. Keyword(s): food preferences; olfaction; sensory science; taste |
| Used skills | |
| Requirements | HNE-30306 Psychobiology of Food Choice and Eating Behaviour; HNE-30506 Sensory Science I: Principles of Sensory Science |