Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi,
I am about to conduct an experiment on the science and psychology of food presentation.
I would really appreciate any ides or advice on the subject, or maybe some links to useful sites.
I have already read the ideas page on this site, so no advice from that page please.
Thanks!

Hi,

That’s a really broad and complex subject area and you did not give us any information about what you plan to test and how you are going to do it. What variables would you choose? There are so many factors that are involved in our response to food—type, appearance, smell, dishes, freshness, hot or cold, time of day, whether the person is hungry or not, whether they are female or male, the mental state of the person, their age, personality, etc.

The effect of food presentation on preferences is certainly an interesting subject but I think it is going to be a really challenging one to do a science project on.

I did a brief search for food preferences and psychology and this is what I came up with:

BBC – Flavour and Personality
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/ ... lity.shtml

Personality predicts food preferences
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... Sg&cad=rja

The Art of Food Presentation
http://www.cravemag.com/features/the-ar ... sentation/

If you want to test people’s response to food presentation, I would think the easiest way to go would be to show them a series of images and have them rate the presentation. But in order to correlate some psychological factors with presentation preferences, I think you would have to have each subject fill out a lifestyle questionnaire. Here are some images of foods that you might select from:
Images for food presentation
https://www.google.com/search?q=food+pr ... d=0CEIQsAQ

As to determining personality correlations for food preferences, I found this questionnaire that gives a score:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

I hope some of this information at least is helpful. Get back to us with some details of your hypothesis and methods for testing and we can help you better.

Sybee

Hi,

Your topic sounds very interesting, because food presentation can affect our eating habits and our health. For example, people tend to eat more when larger servings of food are presented to them. This is especially common in restaurants. Also, experiments with jelly beans show that there is a positive correlation between the number of different colors of jelly beans and the amount of jelly beans that people ate, because the presentation created an illusion of diversity. Interestingly, even the name of the food can cause change people's perception of that food (e.g. chocolate cake v. death by chocolate). I can imagine you performing all kinds of experiments on how food presentation affects people's eating habits. You may want to check out these websites.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... -your-food
http://thinkingandeating.wordpress.com/

Hope this helps.