Multisensory Flavor Priming

Abstract Flavor is multisensory; several interacting sensory systems—taste, smell, and mouthfeel—together comprise “flavor,” making it a cognitively constructed percept rather than a bottom-up sensory one. In this chapter, some of the complications this entails for flavor priming are introduced, along with a taxonomy of different priming situations. In food-related applications of flavor, both bottom-up (sensory) as well as top-down (expectations) processes are at play. Most of the complex interactions that this leads to take place outside the awareness of the perceiving subject. A model is presented where many, past and current, aspects (sensory, surroundings, social, somatic, sentimental) of a (flavor) perception, together result in the perception of a flavor, its liking. or its choice. This model borrows on ideas from priming, situated/embodied cognition, and (food-related) perception.