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Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No

Taste perception, although vital for nutrient sensing, has long been overlooked in sensory assessments. This can, at least in part, be attributed to challenges associated with the handling of liquid, perishable stimuli, but also with scarce efforts to optimize testing procedures to be more time-effi...

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Autores principales: Höchenberger, Richard, Ohla, Kathrin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7019289/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31861903
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu12010024
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author Höchenberger, Richard
Ohla, Kathrin
author_facet Höchenberger, Richard
Ohla, Kathrin
author_sort Höchenberger, Richard
collection PubMed
description Taste perception, although vital for nutrient sensing, has long been overlooked in sensory assessments. This can, at least in part, be attributed to challenges associated with the handling of liquid, perishable stimuli, but also with scarce efforts to optimize testing procedures to be more time-efficient. We have previously introduced an adaptive, QUEST-based procedure to measure taste sensitivity thresholds that was quicker than other existing approaches, yet similarly reliable. Despite its advantages, the QUEST procedure lacks experimental control of false alarms (i.e., response bias) and psychometric function slope. Variations of these parameters, however, may also influence the threshold estimate. This raises the question as to whether a procedure that simultaneously assesses threshold, false-alarm rate, and slope might be able to produce threshold estimates with higher repeatability, i.e., smaller variation between repeated measurements. Here, we compared the performance of QUEST with a method that allows measurement of false-alarm rates and slopes, quick Yes–No (qYN), in a test–retest design for citric acid, sodium chloride, quinine hydrochloride, and sucrose recognition thresholds. We used complementary measures of repeatability, namely test–retest correlations and coefficients of repeatability. Both threshold procedures yielded largely overlapping thresholds with good repeatability between measurements. Together the data suggest that participants used a conservative response criterion. Furthermore, we explored the link between taste sensitivity and taste liking or which we found, however, no clear association.
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spelling pubmed-70192892020-03-04 Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No Höchenberger, Richard Ohla, Kathrin Nutrients Article Taste perception, although vital for nutrient sensing, has long been overlooked in sensory assessments. This can, at least in part, be attributed to challenges associated with the handling of liquid, perishable stimuli, but also with scarce efforts to optimize testing procedures to be more time-efficient. We have previously introduced an adaptive, QUEST-based procedure to measure taste sensitivity thresholds that was quicker than other existing approaches, yet similarly reliable. Despite its advantages, the QUEST procedure lacks experimental control of false alarms (i.e., response bias) and psychometric function slope. Variations of these parameters, however, may also influence the threshold estimate. This raises the question as to whether a procedure that simultaneously assesses threshold, false-alarm rate, and slope might be able to produce threshold estimates with higher repeatability, i.e., smaller variation between repeated measurements. Here, we compared the performance of QUEST with a method that allows measurement of false-alarm rates and slopes, quick Yes–No (qYN), in a test–retest design for citric acid, sodium chloride, quinine hydrochloride, and sucrose recognition thresholds. We used complementary measures of repeatability, namely test–retest correlations and coefficients of repeatability. Both threshold procedures yielded largely overlapping thresholds with good repeatability between measurements. Together the data suggest that participants used a conservative response criterion. Furthermore, we explored the link between taste sensitivity and taste liking or which we found, however, no clear association. MDPI 2019-12-20 /pmc/articles/PMC7019289/ /pubmed/31861903 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu12010024 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Höchenberger, Richard
Ohla, Kathrin
Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title_full Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title_fullStr Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title_full_unstemmed Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title_short Repeatability of Taste Recognition Threshold Measurements with QUEST and Quick Yes–No
title_sort repeatability of taste recognition threshold measurements with quest and quick yes–no
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7019289/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31861903
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu12010024
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