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Updated: May 27, 2026

Assessment of Social Transmission of Food Preferences Behaviors
Published on: January 25, 2018
The role of novelty detection in food memory
Léri Morin-Audebrand1, Jos Mojet, Claire Chabanet
1Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l'Alimentation, UMR CNRS, UMR INRA, Université de Bourgogne, Agrosup Dijon, France.
Abstract:
Memory plays a central role in food choice. Recent studies focusing on food memory in everyday eating and drinking behaviour used a paradigm based on incidental learning of target foods and unexpected memory testing, demanding recognition of the target among distractors, which deviate slightly from the target. Results question the traditional view of memory as reactivation of previous experiences. Comparison of data from several experiments shows that in incidentally learned memory, distractors are rejected, while original targets are not recognised better than by chance guessing. Food memory is tuned at detecting novelty and change, rather than at recognising a previously encountered food.
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