Tasty classification and search: From taste/flavour – vision correspondences to information processing.
Friday 22 August 13:00 until 13:30
Chichester III 3R241
Speaker: Carlos Velasco, DPhil Candidate (Oxford); Marianna Obrist (Informatics, Sussex).
Part of the series: School of Engineering and Informatics: Work In Progress Seminars
Every one of us matches the senses in surprising ways. Take, for instance, the case of tastes/flavours and vision. We typically perceive foods visually before we eat, which makes vision critical for taste/flavour expectations and experience.
In fact, crossmodal correspondences (i.e., the tendency people have to match information across the senses) between tastes or flavours and visual attributes such as shapes and colours have been extensively documented in recent years. Over and above the existing correspondences, researchers have started to assess why these correspondences happen, as well as the way in which they influence processes such as attention.
In this talk, I will present some of my recent research assessing how and why people match colours and shapes to tastes/flavours and how these associations can influence information processing, in particular in the context of classification and visual search for food products. I will also provide some insights as to how this research can inform the process of multisensory product experience design.
Biography: Carlos Velasco is a DPhil candidate in Experimental Psychology at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory led by Prof. Charles Spence, University of Oxford. His research focuses on crossmodal correspondences and visual attention, and its applications to multisensory experience design.
He has participated in both academic and industry congresses including SPSP, IMRF, Pangborn, SXSW, SenseAsia, ABA, Digital Biscuit, and ESOMAR. His research has been published in journals such as Perception, Food Quality and Preference, Journal of Sensory Studies, and Flavour.
In addition to his research career, Carlos founded a consumer research company in Colombia and since then has worked with Diageo, Roja Dove, Takasago, Colombina, Sea Tech, Givaudan, Dow Chemical, Pfizer, Terpel, and many other companies around the world, in a variety of topics such as multisensory design, packaging, branding, advertising, and marketing.
By: Luke Scott
Last updated: Friday, 15 August 2014