Seminar - Perception of Odor Mixtures & Designing Flavors for Novel Foods

Compared to monomolecular odors, we understand very little about how humans process multi-component odors. Since food aromas are almost exclusively contain multiple odorants much of what we know about how humans process these complex odorants is not sufficient for those designing the flavor experience. This seminar will cover a psychophysical study designed to answer two key questions regarding human perception of odor mixtures 1) What odor features do humans notice when attempting to discriminate between subtly different odor mixtures? 2) Are odor mixtures easier to discriminate when an odorant is added, compared to when a component is removed? Using modern aroma chemistry techniques, an odor mixture resembling a generic white wine was constructed. This wine odor mixture was modified using a series of 3 esters which are commonly found in white wines that vary in chain length and branching. Participants performed a sequence of discrimination tasks for the addition / subtraction of modifiers to the base wine at different concentrations. Only one of the esters (ethyl-propanoate) led to a discriminable odor mixture. As concentration of the modifying odorant was increased, discrimination of odor mixtures was first reported because of changes in odor mixture familiarity and then intensity. We found similar sensitivity to changes in odor mixtures regardless of whether the modifying compound was added or subtracted, suggesting that perceptual stability of odor mixtures is equally dependent on both imputing missing information (pattern completion) and disregarding extraneous information. These findings will then be discussed in the context of design the flavor experience of novel foods.

Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/j/99634567556?pwd=OEhMi9LJnuJKw1jQUnaybnZXrkZDbc.1