The Effect of Ambient Light Brightness on Intensity of Flavor Perception

Continuing with the theme of taste perception, this weeks’ blog post highlights a short study on the effects on light brightness on flavor intensity.

It is well documented that there are many different kinds of stimuli that can affect one’s dining experience in a restaurant or shopping experience in a wine shop (or any other retail shop for that matter).  From lighting to music, changing these stimuli can have a profound effect on consumer experience. For example, one 2014 study found that brighter lighting increased consumer desire for spicier foods.  Another study in 2007 found that those who liked stronger coffee prefer to drink their coffee under brighter lights, while those who liked mild or weaker coffee preferred a dimmer lighting atmosphere.

While there have been many studies on ambient stimuli effects on food preference, there hasn’t been as much research in terms of ambient stimuli effects on flavor intensity perception.

A newer study, published as a Short Communication in the March 2021 issue of Food Quality and Preference, aimed to evaluate brightness of light on overall taste/flavor intensity perception in a restaurant setting.

The researchers choose to perform their study in a real-world restaurant setting instead of a more tightly-controlled laboratory setting because while these laboratory studies may provide interesting and useful information, it is rare that we consume basic tastes (sweet, salty, etc.) in total isolation.  In other words, we don’t usually go around our daily lives eating or drinking items that are fully one taste or another.  What we consume usually has some sort of mix of different tastes, and thus setting the experiment in a restaurant where the food items consumed have a more balanced array of tastes and flavors is more telling of real-world experiences.

This study was performed in a “fine dining” restaurant and included 139 participants (49.3% women, average age 50.53 years old).

As participants entered the restaurant, they were greeted and sat at a table.  After ordering drinks, they were presented with the first course of a fixed menu.  The waiter explained that this dish was new on the menu and that they were looking for feedback.  They were then presented with a questionnaire about the dish and were asked to sample the dish prior to looking at and completely the questionnaire. 

The dish itself contained four of the basic tastes: salt, sour, sweet, and bitter, as well as different textures including crispy and creamy. The dish was designed to be as balanced as possible, trying to avoid being heavy on one particular taste over another. Patrons were asked to identify which of the basic tastes they perceived to be the dominant taste in the dish on the provided questionnaire.

After eating the dish, patrons were asked to rate the overall taste/flavor intensity of the dish on a scale of 1-9 (not intense to extremely intense), as well as the perceived pleasantness of the dish on a 1-9 scale.  Patrons also were asked to rate the ambient lighting as well as its perceived pleasantness. Finally, since it’s known that lighting can affect other sensory modalities, patrons were also asked to rate perceived intensity and pleasantness of ambient sounds, smells, and other tactile stimuli (like the feeling of the utensils, etc.).

To examine the effect of brightness, there was a pendant lamp hung above each table that could be adjusted to a desired brightness level.  Patrons were randomly assigned to either the “dim” light setting or the “bright” light setting upon their arrival to the restaurant.  For the dim light setting, brightness was set to 13 lx while for the bright light setting, brightness was set to 300 lx.  For reference, the typical office brightness is about 500 lx and natural daylight is about 10,000 lx.

Results of this study showed that unsurprisingly, bright ambient lighting was perceived as more intense than the dim ambient lighting.  Additionally, there was no difference in perceived pleasantness between dim and bright settings. 

Overall, patrons rated the dish as having more intense tastes/flavor when presented in the bright light setting compared to the dim light setting.  Additionally, light brightness had no effect on the pleasantness of the perceived taste/flavor intensity.

When asked which basic tastes were more dominant in the dish, 43.2% of patrons didn’t consider any of the tastes to be dominant over the others, while 6.8% chose sweet, 14.4% chose salty, 13.6% chose bitter, and 22% chose sour as the dominant tastes/flavors noted.  In other words, these results suggest that the dish was balanced in terms of basic tastes/flavors.

Light brightness also increased the perceived intensity of the other sound and olfactory stimuli, but not the perceived intensity of the touch stimuli (i.e., the feeling of the utensils in the hand).

Conclusions

The overall results of this short study showed that ambient light brightness affects the perceived overall taste/flavor intensity of a dish (brighter light: more intense flavors).  However, this did not seem to correlate with perceived pleasantness of the tastes/flavors.  In other words, changing the ambient light brightness may have affected the intensity of flavors, but it didn’t seem to make the dish taste better or worse under the two light conditions.

Being in a restaurant setting, it’s hard (if not impossible) to determine exact mechanisms behind these or other sensory phenomena. The researchers tried to control as much as they could – they tried to keep other sensory stimuli consistent for each day of the study.  For example, they tried to keep room smells the same, utensil types the same, music volume and playlist the same, etc. 

While it’s tough to form any sort of solid mechanistic reasoning behind the results found here, it is interesting to see how the brain perceives one type of sensory modality when a different type of sensory modality is altered.  This just confirms the complexity of the subject of taste and taste perception, and how independent sensory modalities might interact with one another to paint a more complete picture of the situation in the brain.

Source:

Van der Heijden, K., Festjens, A, and Goukens, C. 2021. On the bright side: The influence of brightness on overall taste intensity perception. Food Quality and Preference 88: 104099.

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