Category: Multisensory

Choosing food

smackenz/ / Activities, Emotion, Flavour, Haptic touch, Hearing, Multisensory, Posts, Smell, Taste, Vision

When it comes to eating, “The first bite is with the eyes”. Feeling the texture stimulates the appetite. 75-95% of the flavour comes from smell and the flavour is enhanced by “sonic seasoning“. Eating is a truly multisensory experience (see our blog for Multisensory processing and Food for thought: taste, smell and flavour.) And it seems the senses also help us decide what food is familiar and, thus, whether to eat it or not.

In this post, I have invited Associate Professor Suzanna Forwood, Anglia Ruskin University to reflect on how the senses affect what food we decide to eat or not to eat. Suzanna Forwood conducts research on the factors that determine our food choices, including available tools for healthy choices.

When offered a menu, most people do not seek out the least familiar dish for their dinner.  This is because most of us need food to be familiar for it to be appealing, and there are good reasons for this. From an evolutionary perspective, familiar food eaten in the past without any ill-effects is more likely to be safe this time, and safe food is essential for survival. From a psychological perspective, familiar food is food that we know about how filling or tasty it might be, and we need this information when choosing something to eat so we can match our current appetite.

When you reflect on it, eating is a profoundly unusual sensory experience. On the one hand, exploring food is necessary to gain the sensory information that makes it familiar: we don’t know whether we like it or want to eat it until it is familiar. On the other hand, eating food is bound up in a social contract: there is an expectation that we know what food we like and that we eat food we are served. This tension is particularly problematic for children who are still learning about the world and find it hard to express what they like. Their reluctance to like and eat less familiar foods can look like picky eating.

Sensory Education activities are designed for children and break this tension: food is not a meal but a game or classroom activity. The philosophy, originating in France and Scandinavia in the Sapere movement, is to offer children the chance to explore food in a structured and non-judgemental activity away from mealtimes. Children are provided with samples of foods, typically fruits or vegetables, to explore using all their senses. Golden rules for these activities are that no one must try or like any of the foods. Activities include variations of a single food or focus on specific senses. Food is discussed in terms of its sensory properties as experienced by the child with no expectation that the child has a preference. Sensory education therefore supports children by growing their familiarity with novel foods, as well as their vocabulary for talking about their sensory experience and communicating their preferences1,2.

The need for familiarity presents challenges when an adult loses part of their sensory world.  Eating is fully multisensory activity: we eat with our eyes, our hands, our mouths, our noses and our ears, and our experience of food merges senses. For example, what we experience as flavour combines information from tastebuds in the mouth and smell receptors in the nose, and what we experience as texture combines information from touch receptors in the mouth and sound receptors in the ear. Simply removing one sensory domain can alter how food is experienced. You can explore this for yourself by tasting a food while holding your nose to block smell or wearing ear defenders to block sound. Doing either of these will change the holistic sensory experience of eating the food: the food will no longer be quite so familiar and there may be a change in how much you like or dislike it.

It’s complicated to adjust to a radical change in sensory or motor function for many reasons but retaining dietary variety and pleasure in eating remains important for health and wellbeing. At a very practical level, then, Sensory Education might offer a structured method for supporting a process of re-learning foods in the new sensory world – re-experiencing foods from an altered multisensory perspective and re-evaluating what is familiar and liked.  Research has not yet explored whether Sensory Education can support adults experiencing sensory difficulty with their diets. We have tried co-developing Sensory Education activities with young adults, and the activities were enjoyed. The next step is to explore whether similar activities can be used with adults adjusting to sensory difficulty, such as visual impairment, or motor difficulty, such as recovery following stroke.

My father is that rare person who chooses unfamiliar foods – I think he enjoys the excitement when on holiday or somewhere new. And I remember thinking this was brave – like most children, I preferred familiar food and was amazed at someone who chose to eat something unknown. As it happened, when the food arrived, he would be presented with a regional dish or a local speciality, and when I tasted it, I learned that unfamiliar foods can be delicious and, in time, familiar favourites. It requires a kind of bravery to explore the unknown.

 

See our blog for Activities; especially 76-78.

 

Some suggestions for further listening, reading, and watching:

Dining in the dark

Eating for children with Sensory Difficulties

5 Sensory Tips for Picky Eaters

How to get your taste and smell back after Covid

I Can’t Taste Anything

Sapere

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1Mustonen, S., Rantanen, R, & Tuorila, H. (2009). Effect of sensory education on school

children’s food perception: A 2-year follow-up study. Food Quality and Preference, 20(3), 230-240. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2008.10.003

2Reverdy, C. (2011). Sensory Education: French Perspectives. In V. R. Preedy, R. R. Watson,

and C. R. (Eds.) Handbook of Behavior, Food and Nutrition (pp. 143-157) New York: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-92271-3_11

Association strategies in crossmodal metaphors

smackenz/ / Crossmodal correspondences, Flavour, Haptic touch, Hearing, Metaphor, Multisensory, Posts, Smell, Taste, Vision

Several correspondences between the senses exist. For example, transferring information about shape between touch and vision. Associating the sound of spoken words and visual shapes (as in the Bouba/Kiki-effect).

Rounded blob and spiky blob
(Bouba [left] and Kiki [right])
And, subjectively, the scent of a specific perfume with the feel of velvet fabrics. (See our blog for the scientific approach, Crossmodal correspondences between the senses, On the intriguing association between sounds and colours, and Multisensory processing.)

These correspondences are visible in crossmodal metaphors too. That is, when people are using words and phrases related to one sense to describe an experience from another sense. Like when they label visual colours, through words that are specific to the sense of hearing, calling them “loud” and “mute”. And define a sound through the sense of touch, as with “a smooth voice”.

 

I have invited researchers connected with the Diverse-ability Interaction Lab to write this post on how people generate and interpret crossmodal metaphors. These researchers have identified seven association strategies. The Diverse-ability Interaction Lab aims to change the design of interactive technologies in ways that make them inclusive, both for people who are disabled and people who are non-disabled. This post is written by Tegan Roberts-Morgan, University of Bristol.

 

“Blue tastes like salt, it just does”. That is what one participant told me when I asked them what blue might taste like. We all make connections between our senses. A citrus smell may be sharp; someone may have a sweet voice, or red might remind you of anger. We call these cross-sensory metaphors, as they use words from one sense to describe something which is typically associated with another sense. As a HCI researcher in sensory technologies, this is important, as understanding how these metaphors are created can give us an insight into the methods behind our sensory thinking, supporting us to hopefully design better sensory technologies.

 

We use association strategies to represent the different methods people use to create connections between different senses. These strategies help us to begin to understand the reasons behind why we make the cross-sensory metaphors that we do. If we can understand why the connections are made, then this can be leveraged in the design of technologies that support communication. To explore these strategies, we designed tasks that encourage participants to think in cross-sensory terms. For example, in Sense-O-Nary, participants are given an item related to a specific sense (e.g. the colour red, a pyramid, or a lemon scent) and asked to describe it using a sense that is not typically associated with it (e.g. what does red smell like, or what does a pyramid sound like?). They then share their cross-sensory metaphor with another team, who must guess which item is being described. This task, along with others we used, helped us to identify the 7 different strategies people use when creating cross-sensory metaphors.

  • Participants used personal stories and memories, and we labelled these as the personal connection strategy. One participant, for example, said that the lemon scent reminded them about when they went “on holiday to the Mediterranean” or “this reminds me of my friend”.
  • Participants also created cross-sensory metaphors using the familiar experience strategy. This is when the metaphor created uses a common object, emotion, texture etc. “This smells like a banana smoothie” or “this reminds me of a marshmallow” and even “this tastes like soy sauce”.
  • Some participants rely on some basic primitives to make an association, which we labelled as the sensory features strategy. This includes words like “sharp”, “smooth”, “soft” “bitter” and “sweet”.
  • Participants also used the valence strategy, using negative or positive words in the description, for example “I like this”, “I love this“ and “this would taste horrible”.
  • Another approach was using vocalisation. This involved participants using a sound or noise as
  • opposed to words to describe an item like “this sounds like Krrrr and tssssss”, “boooom” or when one child just screamed to describe what red may sound like.
  • Some participants chose not to use the sense that we originally asked them to use; they would instead use words from a different sense. We called this grasping for another sense. In one study we asked participants to describe how red would taste and they said, “this tastes strong”.
  • Finally, some participants did not only use their words to communicate their connection, but they also used their body. When they did this, they used the embodied action strategy. An example includes when one participant said green “feels like this” and then stroked the floor back and forth.

 

We believe that understanding and using these strategies can support designers, educators, and researchers in creating experiences that align with how people naturally relate the senses. For instance, we found that most adults used personal connections when describing how something would sound, so incorporating prompts or features that relate to a memory the person may have could support their communication.

 

We have found that age plays a vital role in what association strategies a person uses. Children tend to use familiar experiences the majority of the time, describing the item using something common. Whereas young adults (18-25 years olds) also used familiar experiences, but used personal connections, additionally, to create their metaphor. And finally older adults (65-80 years old) used a much wider range of association strategies, with sensory features being used more often.

 

These association strategies can be applied in any context that involves multisensory interactions, from educational devices that support children learning about their phonics by using shapes and audio, boards that can help children explain how their pain feels by using scents, shapes, colours etc., and accessible technology to support communication between children who are sighted and children who are visually impaired. Ultimately, association strategies give us a window into how people construct meaning across their senses. By recognising and applying these strategies, we can potentially design experiences that resonate more deeply, communicate more clearly, and build richer, more inclusive multisensory worlds.

 

See our blog for Activities; especially 70-72.