Contact person
Kathryn Harris
Projektledare
Contact Kathryn
Quantifying the perception of change
For answers to questions such as: How does varying sweetener content increase perceived sweetness? How much weight can we remove from a carton before it is noticeably less luxurious? How thick can we make a protective coating before visibility is noticeably impaired?
Often, understanding the perception of a product involves understanding the effect of a series of small changes, either directly, as changes to formulations, design, or appearance, or indirectly, as in the effect of a cosmetic or a treatment.
Quantification of the perceptual ’difference’ between sample pairs allows us to identify such useful sensory characteristics as the point of subjective equality - the point at which two different samples are effectively perceptually identical. It is also a reliable and often higher resolution way to rank samples along perceptual scales, compared to attribute scaling.
The utility of paired comparison methods lies in the simplicity of the resulting data: It is possible to succintly communicate the perceptual effect of a single variable. These methods work to identify the magnitudes of step changes in perception, which are often non-linear, and the responses are easy to evaluate in relation to physical and chemical properties such as composition, viscosity, surface texture, density, elasticity, etc.
