Il ruolo della memoria alimentare nello studio del consumatore

Memory plays a fundamental role in food choice. At the critical moment of a choice, consumers choose to buy a product rather than another on the basis of memories for the experiences they had with that or a similar product. Food memory is a kind of implicit memory, based on an incidental learning of the sensory properties of a food. In fact, it is extremely unusual that when eating or drinking we consciously decide to remember a food. Recently, it has been proposed an implicit paradigm to study food memory in conditions similar to those happening in everyday life. Such a paradigm consists of inviting people to the lab under a false pretence (i.e. studying hunger feeling) and to offer them a meal containing different items among those a target food. The target is the only food for which memory will be tested later. The crucial feature of this paradigm is that, in order to ensure incidental learning of the target, people are not asked to memorize anything but just to consume the food, and in accordance with the false pretence, to rate their hunger feeling over the day. After a given retention interval, the same consumers are invited again to the lab and unexpectedly asked to perform a memory test. Participants are presented with the target and several distractors (i.e. slightly modified version of the target), and for each sample, they have to indicate whether this sample has been tasted previously or not. This work is intended as a critical review of the most recent studies on sensory memory to outline both the basic characteristics, which characterize sensory memory mechanisms, and the various factors (i.e. age, sex, liking, and culture), which affect incidental learning of food products. Understanding of mechanisms, through which food properties are recalled, can provide interesting implications for companies in both marketing sector and development of new products.