Quantitative Sensory Analysis: Psychophysics, Models and Intelligent Design

aw ss This book offers an advanced, quantitative approach to sensory science problems. Mainstream sensory evaluation, as practiced in the foods and consumer products industries, is often primarily concerned with day-to-day tests of pairs of products. Although such testing is often necessary, one can lose sight of the underlying models and theory for product discrimination and quantitative description upon which our test procedures and statistical methods are based. Sensory evaluation procedures have their roots in classical psychophysics and statistical methods. Quantitative Sensory Analysis provides a basis for models underpinning sensory testing for the advanced student and sensory scientist. Topics that lend themselves to quantitative analysis such as the theory behind scaling, shelf life modeling and threshold estimation are treated. The book is not designed as a guide to data analysis and sensory statistics alone, but treats quantitative modeling in a broader view. It attempts to gather together all the quantitative models for sensory phenomena and sensory data in one work. Rather than focus simply on data handling issues, the book will have a psychological emphasis, for example, examining why experimental designs that use panelists as their own controls are often more powerful for finding product differences.