Compared with the locations of low-calorie foods, people are more likely to remember the locations of high-calorie foods they smelled or tasted.
Dutch scientists conducted an experiment in which people walked around the room under the guidance of arrows on the floor. They placed eight kinds of food from one table to another: caramel biscuits, apples, chocolate, tomatoes, melons, peanuts, potato chips and cucumbers.
They were instructed to smell or taste the food, and to rate it based on its affinity. But they were not told the real purpose of the experiment: to determine how well they remembered the location of the food in the room.
Of the 512 people in the experiment, half were tested by tasting and half were tested by smelling food. After leaving the room, they smelled or tasted the food again in a random order and were asked to find them on the map of the room they had just walked through.
The results, published in Scientific Reports, showed that they were 27% more likely to place high-calorie foods correctly than the low-calorie foods they tasted, and 28% more likely to correctly locate the high-calorie foods they smelled.
The lead author, Rachelle de Vries, a PhD student at Wageningen University and Research Institute in the Netherlands, said: “Our findings seem to indicate that the human mind has adapted to find energy-rich foods in an effective way.” “This may be right. How do we adapt to the modern food environment to have an impact.”
www.lstchocolatemachine.com
Post time: Oct-15-2020
