Sensory-specific satiety is impervious to the tasting of other foods with its assessment

Sensory-specific satiety (SSS) refers to the reduction in pleasantness of a food with its consumption relative to other unconsumed foods. In a typical SSS paradigm, the participants receive a range of food items to taste and evaluate and then one of the foods is consumed ad libitum until satiation. After the consumption of the test food, all the foods (including the test food) are then again tasted and evaluated. If SSS is the result of habituation this evaluation of the test food after its consumption would be subject to dishabituation (i.e. recovery of SSS) if the other unconsumed foods are evaluated first. To examine whether this is the case a total of 57 participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: Test Food First (TFF; n=28) or Test Food Last (TFL; n=29). We hypothesized that group TFF would show stronger SSS than TFL. We found clear indication of SSS, but the degree of SSS did not differ between the two groups (F[1,55]<1). This finding suggests that SSS is unaffected by the sequence of tasting food items with its assessment. The potential implications for understanding SSS in terms of habituation are discussed.