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Human senses in action

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 HUMAN SENSES IN ACTION
Magni Martens, Wender Bredie, Garmt Dijksterhuis, Harald Martens,
Ep Köster and Per Møller

The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University

Rolighedsvej 30, DK-1958 Frederiksberg C, Denmark

INTRODUCTION
The ”human senses in action” may be considered as our principal way of obtaining
knowledge about the world around us. During every moment, each of us is embedded in
streams of physical energy: e.g. light and sound waves, electromagnetic fields, mechanical
forces, optical and chemical phenomena. Much of this physical energy passes by without
being noticed, while some of it reaches our senses and attention, giving rise to more or less
conscious experiences: we hear the sound of music, we see the litmus paper turns from red to
blue and we taste the bitterness of beer. Maybe we are not aware of the fact that we are
constantly using our senses, also in scientific work?
Traditionally, quantification of connections between physical energies and
psychological experiences has belonged to the field of psychophysics. At the web site of the
International Society of Psychophysics the following general definition of psychophysics is
offered by John C. Baird and Elliot Noma from their 1978 book, Fundamentals of Scaling
and Psychophysics (John Wiley & Sons, Inc), on page 1:

Psychophysics is commonly defined as the quantitative

branch of the study of perception, examining the relations
between observed stimuli and responses and the reasons for
those relations. This is, however, a very narrow view of the
influence it has had on much of psychology. Since its
inception, psychophysics has been based on the assumption
that the human perceptual system is a measuring
instrument yielding results (experiences, judgments,
responses) that may be systematically analyzed. Because of
its long history (over 100 years), its experimental methods,
data analyses, and models of underlying perceptual and
cognitive processes have reached a high level of
refinement. For this reason, many techniques originally
developed in psychophysics have been used to unravel
problems in learning, memory, attitude measurement, and
social psychology. In addition, scaling and measurement
theory have adapted these methods and models to analyze
decision making in contexts entirely divorced from
perception.

The present lecture* aims at linking the field of sensory science to the psychophysical area as
defined by Baird and Noma (1978) by giving examples from ongoing research in our
laboratory**. How can the two fields benefit from each other?

* Parts of this lecture was presented at the 3rd Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium “Sense and Sensibility” in
Norway 1998 (Martens 1999).
** see also http://www.mli.kvl.dk/sensory
 2

THE UNIQUENESS AND ROLE OF SENSORY SCIENCE

Sensory science is a multidisciplinary field comprising measurement, interpretation and
understanding of human responses to product properties as perceived by the senses of sight,
smell, taste, touch and hearing. Research on “human senses in action” relies heavily on
empirical and theoretical contributions from many sciences spanning from physiology and
psychology to chemistry and statistics. Understanding stimuli-response interactions between a
complex biological material (e.g. foods) and a complex human
sensation-perception-cognition system in a cultural context needs more basic research into
these multivariate relationships. As such, sensory science addresses multivariate
psychophysics, as will be discussed below.
What distinguishes the two fields may be that sensory science since its very beginning
in the fifties, has had equal focus on both the product properties and the human perception,
while psychophysics has more addressed the classical, univariate stimulus-response
modelling.
Further, while psychophysics has developed mainly in academia, the role of sensory
science may be viewed as a problem-oriented, pragmatic discipline bridging academia,
industry and society at large. It has proven successful in R&D and quality assurance in
industries producing e.g. beverages, foods, pharmaceuticals, textiles, cars and perfumes. High
international competition has forced producers to provide goods that satisfy consumers’ stated
and implied needs including the demand for high sensory quality. Also, interest in sensory
science is increasing among health and nutritional professionals in relation to food intake of
e.g. fat and sugar, consumer groups are requiring reduction of additives and development of
ecological products which still ‘taste good’, and industries are interested in human perception
of contaminants in air, water and soil and the annoyance they may induce.
However, this rapid growing success in practice now ask for more basic research into
sensory perception and cognition. Thus, an interesting link towards modern psychophysics
arises.

HUMAN SENSES AS A MEASURING INSTRUMENT

According to the above mentioned definition ”…psychophysics has been based on
the assumption that the human perceptual system is a measuring instrument
yielding results (experiences, judgements, responses) that may be systematically
analyzed”. What is meant by that?
In sensory science the human senses constitute the main instrument. Sensory methods
are developed for different purposes ranging from laboratory threshold tests to consumer
tests, in both cases to be performed in a scientific way. In a natural scientific and
technological context sensory science is often considered to be a ‘soft’ discipline, while in a
psychological or humanistic context the same sensory science is ‘hard’. Arguing that sensory
methods are reliable, relevant, robust and rapid (and as such: cheap!) seems to be provocative
in both camps. The technologists do not trust human measurements, while the humanists
protest against viewing ’man as an instrument’.
Nevertheless, the argument that sensory methods are reliable, relevant, robust and
rapid (and cheap) means: Reliable in statistical terms (i.e. reproducible) when performed in a
correct way. Relevant since sensory quality usually refers to perception of a product by human
beings (e.g. the consumers). Thus, sensory methods are more likely to be valid and relevant to
the final goal, than indirect e.g. chemical measurements. Robust in the way that the human
brain has a fantastic ability to adjust for irrelevant noise in the measurements. What may be
complex for instruments in chemistry and physics may prove to be simple for the nose and
eye. Rapid because mostly no time-consuming sample preparation is needed compared to e.g.
 3

gas chromatography. Further, many product properties, such as colour, flavour and texture are
measured by one instrument (i.e. the human senses) and on the same samples instead of using
e.g. spectrophotometers for colour, GC for smell, HPLC for taste and Rheological
instruments for texture. That sensory methods are cheap is almost taboo to say. But what are
the costs of buying, mastering, maintaining and operating a large laboratory of expensive
instruments covering the whole spectrum of the different sense modalities?

A MULTIVARIATE AND MULTIMODAL PERSPECTIVE

Viewing sensory perception as an act of becoming aware of a multitude of chemical and
physical information about a product (e.g. chemical compounds, light, pressure, sound,
temperature) by a multitude of senses (e.g. sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch,) requires a
multivariate and multimodal relational approach. The more we realize and accept the
multivariability the stronger is the requirement for multivariate thinking and modelling.
Multivariate psychophysics is needed simply because the ”real world” is multivariate.
Combining multivariate psychophysics and multivariate experimental design and data
analysis allows us to find the latent phenomena underlying both the sensory and physical
worlds, and thus challenges univariate and over-simplified views on reliability and validity of
measurements and models. Statistical valid and cognitively accessible multivariate data
analysis is important for giving scientists a tool to reveal the space of latent structure between
predictability and surprise.

BASIC SENSORY RESEARCH IS NEEDED

For strengthening the sensory field it is of utmost importance to find common platforms for
the different main sciences so that the psychologists don’t feel that human beings are reduced
to chemistry and physiology, and on the other hand, that natural scientists and technologists
get passive due to all the ‘talking’ and ‘opinions’ about the complexity of human nature. We
need a non-reductive platform for new theories.
One such non-reductive theory of sense perception may consist of a number of
psychophysical principles, principles connecting the properties of physical processes via the
sensing processes to perceived experience. To achieve this in a new way, more relational and
multivariate approaches to sensory science in a dynamic domain are important. This means
increased basic understanding of interactions between complex matters (e.g. food products)
and the complexity of the human minds (sensation – perception – cognition processing)
changing with context and over time. It also means more research into the connections
between physiological measurements (e.g. brain scan or glucose status of a person) and the
affective and cognitive psychological experiences (e.g. I like this product vs I can name it).
Here potential collaboration with psychophysicists is obvious to develop “...experimental
methods, data analyses, and models of underlying perceptual and cognitive processes...” (cf.
definition in the Introduction).

SENSORY SCIENCE IN ACTION: CHEMISTRY AND PSYCHOLOGY

HAND-IN-HAND
In the research strategy for our group (2001-2006) a sensory science competence is to be
strengthened with the aim to achieve better understanding of food perception and cognition of
foods. What happens in the brain when we see, smell, taste, and touch a product? Which
physiological and psychological factors influence on sensory evaluations? How do memory
and emotion influence on consumers’ food choice? Research projects will be of a basic nature
 4

and should contribute to an improved understanding of the interaction between the

chemical/physical stimuli from the product and the effect of memories, to result in a human
response. The research projects described in the following are the first in a planned series of
sensory, physiological and psychological investigations whose goal is to provide insight into
the whole chain from molecular chemistry to studies on emotions, necessary to explore the
nature of stimuli-response relationships.

Brain research within sensory science

Methodological advances within the field of (cognitive) neuroscience over the last 10 years
now make it possible to study neural processing in the human brain at spatial and temporal
scales which open up possibilities of understanding the complex processes in the central
nervous system (CNS) which are responsible for how we perceive and prefer foods. As part
of a larger project on the perception and cognition of foods, we have initiated physiological
work applying modern techniques from cognitive neuroscience: e.g. fMRI (functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and NIRS (Near InfraRed Spectroscopy).
fMRI is especially useful in localizing active areas in the brain during performance of
specific tasks. We use fMRI to study basic questions related to odour and texture perception
and the representation of aversion and pleasure in olfaction. In order to study olfaction
combined with fMRI a special dynamic olfactometer is being built to transport controlled
amounts of simple stimuli or mixtures of stimuli to the test subject. For technical reasons it is
not possible with fMRI, to scan an observer who performs in a task with real-life, complex
food stimuli. We are therefore developing methods in which we use fMRI on simple food
stimuli to generate initial hypothesis about relevant brain areas and then afterwards testing
these with cortical transcranial NIRS and complex food stimuli.
fMRI and NIRS measure brain activity indirectly via the coupling of neural activity to
blood flow. Since this coupling is not immediate, these methods do not allow us to extract
dynamic information. We are therefore bringing in other modern physiological methods for
more direct measurement of brain activities to obtain further and complementary information
on the localization and dynamics of e.g. affective processing in olfaction and in addressing
fundamental questions of independence/dependence of cognitive and affective processing.
These investigations, in conjunction with psychological and sensory experiments, will throw
light on the hypothesis of the primacy of affect (e.g. Zajonc 1984) and they will inform us of
the functional architecture of the olfactory system.

Lateralisation in olfaction: affection and cognition

In the literature on olfaction an effect of which nostril is used to smell an odour is sometimes
reported (Herz et al. 1999). A lateralisation effect could be due to a difference between the
two brain halves, a prevailing hypothesis being that the left one is predominantly active
during analytical tasks, here naming and recognizing odours, whereas the right one is more
involved with affective processing (Schwarz et al. 1975), in our case assessing the
pleasantness of odours. We want to investigate whether if the potential lateralisation of
affective and cognitive processing in olfaction can be studied by psychophysical means.
In a recent experiment data on 52 subjects and 16 odours were collected spanning the
whole hedonic range from very unpleasant to very pleasant. Preliminary results were similar
to those published by Herz et al. (1999), who suggested that odours are rated as more pleasant
when sniffed through the right nostril, potentially indicating laterality in the processing of
affective information. Our data suggest that this might be the case, but further data analysis is
needed. For both left-handers and right-handers, the right nostril seems to rate odours as more
pleasant than the left nostril to a weak degree. Taken together, the data on the right and left
nostrils demonstrate significantly that right-handers rate odours as more pleasant than
 5

left-handers. Right-handers also significantly perceive the odours as more intense than
left-handers.

Basic psychological processes in sensory science

Why do some foods taste good? This question inquires about representations of affection in
CNS, rather than representations of descriptions of the material properties of the
physical/chemical stimuli. Descriptive processing of stimuli delivers answers to questions of
detection, discrimination, identification and other tasks which do not require the subject to
determine whether a stimulus is aversive or pleasant. Descriptive processing is performed by
perceptual and cognitive systems in the brain which could in principle be independent of the
emotional processing that delivers representations of the degree of pleasantness of a stimulus
(Zajonc 1984). Alternatively emotional processing could be completely dependent on results
of cognitive processing (Lazarus 1984, see also Rolls 1999) or there could be some more
interactive interplay between emotional and cognitive processes.
Affective processing carries great value in determining whether a stimulus is,
say, poisonous and has probably been an important selection principle in
phylogenetic development. If so, we can hypothesise that emotion has primacy over
cognition. More specifically, we want to test the hypothesis that extraction of
affective information is a faster process than extraction of purely descriptive
information. An indication that this should indeed be the case can also be inferred
from the fact that the distance from a sense-organ to the emotional centres in the
brain are, in terms of number of synapses, shorter than the pathways leading to
'analytical'/'cognitive' brain centres (see e.g. Buck 1990).

Molecular chemistry – sensory perception: modelling of flavour compounds

Moving from emotions to molecules: Over the last decades ca. 8000 volatile flavour
compounds have been identified in various foods of which an estimated 400 compounds
playing a major role in food flavour. These compounds possess relatively low odour threshold
values in water and several of them have been identified as “key” odorants in foods by
GC-olfactometry analysis. Little attention has been given to understanding why such a
relatively small number of odorants is so important in food flavour.
Using a molecular-sensory modelling approach, quantum-chemical descriptors for
both quantitative and qualitative sensory properties of flavour compounds are sought. Such
descriptors may give additional information about the role and function of these compounds
both in foods and in the human sensory system. In addition, predictive models for novel
flavour compounds from quantum-chemical computations based on their molecular structure,
may be built from available qualitative and quantitative sensory data.
A preliminary investigation calculated a range of molecular descriptors encoding for
different molecular energies, electron distribution features and molecular geometries for 19
compounds with a predominant “roasted-sweet” odour characteristic. In a multivariate data
analysis the molecular descriptors were correlated to the odour thresholds reported for the
compounds in water. Molecular-sensory modelling appears to have potential to find
molecular features that determine why certain molecules have an important impact in food
flavour.

Can we trust the senses? Multivariate modelling and validation tools

Reliability and validity of sensory data are, of course, important in answering the question
“Can we trust the senses?” New tools for validating multivariate data analytical models are
being developed based on e.g. Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) (Martens and
Martens 2000). From a data analytical point of view the benefit of this development is that it
 6

links the visually oriented interpretation of designed experiments by PLSR to the more formal
statistical Analysis of Variance, and shows that the different levels of validity can be checked
without difficult statistical theory. Preliminary studies of structure and reliability of sensory
data by combining PLSR with Procrustes analysis (Dijksterhuis 1997) and different multiway
models have started, also related to modelling time-intensity curves.
Our results from several experiments indicate that it is easier to obtain an
intersubjective consensus among panellists for appearance, and thereafter texture, than for
flavour. This raises many interesting interpretations which may be linked to the distinctions
between the “higher and “lower” senses (Köster 2000).

CONCLUSIONS
The research into “human senses in action” needs to continue to aim at sound sensory theories
and methods based on new understanding of sensation-perception-cognition processing,
multivariate and multimodal psychophysics as well as more basic understanding of potentials
in modern multivariate data analysis.

REFERENCES
Buck, R. (1990) William James, the nature of knowledge, and current issues in emotion, cognition and
communication. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 16, 612-625.

Dijksterhuis, G.B. (1997) Multivariate data analysis in sensory and consumer science. Food and Nutrition
Press, USA.

Herz, R.S, McCall C. and Cahill, L. (1999) Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness
versus odor names. Chem. Senses, 24, 691-695.

Köster, E.P. (2000) The specific characteristics of the sense of smell (submitted)

Lazarus, R.S. (1984) On the primacy of cognition. American Psychologist, 39, 124-129.

Martens, H. and Martens, M. (2000) Modified jack-knife estimation of parameter uncertainty in bilinear
modelling by partial least squares regression (PLSR). Food Quality and Preference, 11, 5-16.

Martens, M. (1999) A philosophy for sensory science. Food Quality and Preference, 10, 233-244.

Rolls, E.T. (1999) The brain and emotion.. Oxford University Press Inc., NY

Schwarz, G.E., Davidson R.J. and Maer F. (1975) Science, 190, 286-288.

Zajonc, R.B. (1984) On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist, 39, 117-123.

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