Affective same-different discrimination tests for assessing consumer discriminability between milks with subtle differences

Abstract

Affective and analytical same-different discrimination tests for assessing the ability of consumers to discriminate between milks with subtle differences were designed by applying familiarization procedures to induce an affective/synthetic and analytical/synthetic perceptual strategy. The tests were then administered to 100 milk consumers and compared. In both same-different discriminations, consumers adopted a cognitive decision rule that used a β-strategy rather than a τ-strategy. Discrimination tests employing an affective/synthetic perceptual approach (which is the normal consumer perceptual process) resulted in higher discriminability than tests that employed an analytical/synthetic approach. Inter-individual differences in the consumer criteria (boundaries) used for same-different ratings were studied by examining the response distributions over the given response categories for the same pairs. According to the similarity of such response distributions, two different consumer segments were classified and their group discriminabilities differed significantly, with only the more sensitive group showing interactions between the affective/hedonic state and perceptual discriminability. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.