Vanessa Harrar
Sensory neuroscientist and first author of the study that found the cutlery you eat with changes the taste of the food.
Who they are
Harrar varied the weight, size, shape and colour of plastic cutlery independently, then measured what each change did to ratings of sweetness, saltiness, perceived value and liking.
It is one of the few studies in this area that manipulates four properties at once, which is how it caught the interactions.
Key papers
Harrar, V., & Spence, C. (2013). The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it. Flavour, 2, 21.
Key ideas
Yoghurt was perceived as denser and more expensive from a lighter plastic spoon than from artificially weighted ones.
Cutlery colour moved taste ratings only in combination with the colour of the food, which points at contrast rather than at colour carrying flavour.
Food was rated saltiest when sampled from a knife. The authors read the whole pattern as disconfirmed expectation.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1186/2044-7248-2-21