It is important to differentiate sensory property from the material property
Section snippets
Sensory property is a human-perceived property of a material, but not a material property
Sensory property and material property are two properties fundamentally different. The delicate difference between the two can be demonstrated by their very different mechanisms of detection/sensation and the very different mathematical models used for data analysis. Sensory property is by nature human's physiological as well as psychological responses to external stimuli acting alone or in combination, via channels of vision, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, either independently or
Can a sensory property be instrumentally measured?
While it is perfectly feasible to measure a material property using various physical instruments or devices, it is in principle not feasible (at least with current technology) to instrumentally measure the sensory property of a material. There were many cases in literature reporting sensory perception based on instrumental measurement, in particular in the perception of food texture (Chen & Opara, 2013). Unfortunately, many of such cases mixed up sensory properties perceived by human with the
Derived sensory properties are more complicated
We all know that sensory perception and food preference are much more complicated than just five basic tastes. Instead of being dominated by one single material property, most sensory properties are originated or derived from two or more material stimuli in complicated combination (Chen, 2014). Analysis of derived sensory properties is simply beyond the prediction of Stevens' law. Examples of derived sensory property are extensive. A convenient example is the sweet-sour taste, a very common
Oral sensory perception is not from the food alone, but from the food-saliva mixture
Another very important fact which attracted a lot of attention recently is the critical role of saliva in sensory perception of food flavor and texture. It is now clear that what one perceives during an eating process are not the properties of the food itself but the properties of the mixture of food and saliva (Mosca & Chen, 2017). Saliva is a biofluid with individually varied properties (Neyraud & Morzel, 2019). Extensive studies have confirmed that complicated interactions occur during food
Acknowledgement
The author thanks financial support for this research work from the National Key Research and Development of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant number 1110KZ0117057) and Natural Science Funding Council (grant number 31871885) of China.
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