Seventh Season Julia Child’s “The French Chef”The first television series to be broadcast in color, Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise demonstrated how color can transform the dining experience: while Child had captivated audiences in black and white, watching Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise in color elevated the experience from mere entertainment to a mouthwatering one.
I am a psychologist I am a visual ability researcher, and through a serendipitous research journey into individual differences in food perception, my research has uncovered the unique role of color in our emotional responses to food.
Bouillabaisse La Marseillaise in grayscale, color and with simulations of the most common color blindness (based on daltonlens.org). (Credit: Image Professionals GmbH/Foodcollection via Getty Images)
The ability to recognize food varies from person to person.
This journey began when my students and I measured the extent to which people differ in their ability to recognize images of cooked food. Over the past two decades, we and other researchers have learned that people differ more than originally expected. How well can you identify and distinguish objects?Birds, cars, faces, etc.
Clearly, some people know more about birds or cars than others, but what’s interesting is that there is just as much variability in face recognition ability, even though nearly all sighted people have seen faces.
Our experience with food is also universal. We were interested to see to what extent people differ in their ability to recognize food. In our tests, we simply asked people Match images of the same dish Finding an unusual dish among similar dishes or among unusual dishes. Individuals’ performance on these tasks varies widely, and this can be explained in part by the following reasons: A general ability to recognize objects of all kinds.
But some of the variation in people’s food perceptions could not be explained by this general ability. Instead, they speculated that this variability might be related to people’s attitudes toward novel foods.Don’t trust new foodsPeople who say, “I’m very particular about food” have what’s known as “food neophobia.” Leads to poor dietary qualityThis increases the risk of nutritional deficiencies and chronic diseases.
As expected, picky eaters performed worst on the food recognition test. Food neophobia is negatively correlated with food recognition ability.
Example of a test to measure food recognition ability: Which of these foods is unusual? The top row shows colored dishes, the bottom row simulates the most common color blindness (based on daltonlens.org). The second image is the unusual one; you can see that the pizza crust is more pronounced in its normal color. (Credit: Rouzes/E+, Carlo A/Moment, Yulia Naumenko/Moment, rudisill/E+ via Getty Images)
Color links food novelty fear and perception
While we were presenting our results, other scientists were discussing new discoveries about how the brain responds to food and color. Different research groups were identifying brain regions in the visual system that respond preferentially to images of food. For example, seeing a bowl of pasta activates these brain regions, but seeing a pile of strings does not.
The scientific disagreement has been about what it means to pinpoint selectivity for food in an area of the brain already known to be responsive to color.
One group has proposed that these parts of the brain respond to color. Because they are specialized in recognizing foodThe other group is Color doesn’t matter to how the brain responds to foodThe researchers also showed that similar brain activation can occur when viewing greyscale images of food.
Could it be that color is not important for food recognition, but that it does play a special role? We decided to replicate the original study using grayscale food images.
Child himself could have predicted the results: without color, people would of course make mistakes and confuse different dishes for the same type of food, The pattern of differences between people was otherwise unchanged.Individuals with better general visual ability also performed better with food, and we again found a specific ability for food that went beyond this general effect.
But I found that removing color does have one effect. Food fears were no longer correlated with food recognition abilityIt was as if the advantage adventurous eaters had over picky eaters depended entirely on color.
Based on these results, we proposed two separate components of food-specific recognition abilities: one that is independent of color, explaining why the results are the same with and without color in our experiments, and the other that is related to emotional responses, which is based on color and is evidenced by the finding that food phobia is related to food recognition only when foods are presented in color.
So we made a completely new prediction: People with color blindness, especially men, Men are 16 times more likely to be women—Do people with color blindness feel less fear towards food than people with normal color vision? People with color blindness can only see food in a limited range of colors, Some warning signals Factors that may cause anxiety about new foods, such as freshness and safety, may be limited.
We recruited participants online based on their answers to a question about color blindness buried in a lengthy screening questionnaire. Participants, including men, had no idea that we were interested in color blindness when we asked them to fill out the Food Neophobia Scale, a measure of resistance to novel foods.
Color-blind men were found to have lower food novelty ratings than non-color-blind men. This result was replicated in another study. Color-blind men also report less food aversionSeeing the world through a limited color palette appears to reduce emotional resistance to new foods.
Food colors can encode important information. (Credit: Steve Goossen/Design Pics via Getty Images)
Emotional responses to colors and foods
Our findings are largely consistent with other studies: Color helps us determine if food is cooked. Whether the produce is ripe or rottenPeople Prefers a diet that includes a variety of colorful foodsIn other studies, Color affects the taste of foodSome biologists believe that the colors of plants and the ability of animals to detect them are related. We have evolved together.
The role of color in our emotional responses to food opens up new avenues for addressing extreme food phobias. As researchers learn more about the complex relationship between color vision and food, targeted interventions may be developed to improve eating habits. Like Julia Child’s colorful dishes, understanding and harnessing the power of color can increase our appreciation and enjoyment of food.
Isabelle Gautier is the David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. This article is conversation Under Creative Commons License.Please read Original article.
