Topics

Topics to be covered will include the contribution of sensory science as a multidisciplinary perspective applied to specific issues of general interest (Sensory for…), and input and contributions from other fields and disciplines to the methodological refinement of the sensory science (...other fields for sensory):

SENSORY FOR…

• Health
  Vegetable perception and acceptability in children, adolescents and elderly; Functional food acceptability; Therapy effect on taste and smell function; Tailored nutrition; Wellbeing; Satiety; Nudging; Food safety.
• Innovation
  Incremental, radical and disruptive innovation; Creative design; Sensory and emotion-driven design; Senso-hedonic and senso-emotional optimization; Sensory marketing and communication; Novelty
• Sustainability
  Barriers to sustainable consumption; Food-waste; Food Security; Social sustainability; Organic products; Origin; Local products; Authenticity; By-products; Quality perception; Acceptability of suboptimal products; Environmental footprints; Insect ingredients; Vegetable protein.
• Eating out Food acceptance in institutional canteen; Foodservice for children, workers, and elderly; Real-life setting experiments; Food pairings and gastronomy; Immersive test and virtual reality; Context studies.
• Individual differences Taste and smell sensitivity and function; Somesthetic function; Thermal Taste; Fat perception; Sweetness hedonics; Psychological traits; Cross-cultural differences; Gender/sex differences.

…OTHER FIELDS FOR SENSORY

• Genetics
  Genome-Wide Association studies in food preference and choice; Genetic markers of taste and odor perception; Epigenetic; Genotype/gene expression.
• Mind science
  Reward; Learning; Emotions; Expectations; Attention; Memory; Categorization; Implicit methods; Cross-modal perception; Cognitive science; Food cognition.
• Text analysis
  Open-ended questions; Questionnaire design; Describing sensory perception and emotions; Translation and adaptation in cross-cultural studies; Video and photos analysis to investigate product experience.
• New technologies Data mining and big data; Social media analysis; Virtual/augmented reality; New technologies for data collection (apps; wearable); Artificial intelligence.
• Statistics
  Advances in multivariate statistical methods, clustering and classification; Statistics in large scale-studies.
• Advanced instrumental analysis
  Sensory response associated with chemicals; Neuroimaging of chemosensory function; Image Analysis; Advanced rheological/physical measurements; Food breakdown / food oral processing.