TASTE DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS: CONCEPT FORMATION, ALIGNMENT AND APPROPRIATENESS

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The commonly used approach to psychophysical taste descriptive analysis called ‘taste profiling’was assessed to determine whether it produced concept alignment with an agreed set of labels; it did not. After judges had been trained using a concept alignment procedure involving fifty‐nine standards, the procedure was assessed to see whether broadly defined concepts of ‘sweet’, ‘sour’, ‘salty’and ‘bitter’generalized to various stimuli; they did not. It was concluded that the technique is inferior to currently used methods of descriptive analysis.