Multisensory Perception of Food Cues

Multisensory perception of food cues refers to the dynamic integration of information from vision, olfaction, taste, touch and even audition to form coherent judgments about food quality, safety and desirability. Visual cues such as colour, shape and luminance guide initial expectations regarding freshness, calorie content and flavour intensity, while aromas activate memory traces and influence taste sensitivity. Textural properties perceived through mouthfeel and mastication further refine hedonic and nutritional assessments. Crossmodal correspondences—systematic associations between sensory dimensions—underpin phenomena such as red–sweet and green–sour pairings, shaping both conscious preferences and automatic reactions. Together, these processes occur at multiple neural levels, from early sensory cortices to higher-order association areas, and can be modulated by culture, experience and context. Understanding how these cues interact is critical for public health, for example in designing packaging that promotes healthier choices, and for industry applications ranging from augmented-reality flavour enhancement to optimised product development.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Foundational work has demonstrated that human observers estimate arousal and perceived calorie content of foods directly from visual colour brightness. In one study, red-brightness enhanced arousal and calorie estimations, whereas green-brightness suppressed them, mirroring patterns observed in non-human primates and highlighting an evolutionarily conserved mechanism for energy assessment. More recent advances have used real-time augmented-reality systems to manipulate the standard deviation of luminance in food images while preserving chromaticity. By dynamically altering the visual texture of cakes and condiments, researchers showed that participants’ expected moistness, wateriness and overall deliciousness could be increased or decreased. Crucially, these manipulations also modulated actual taste perceptions on sampling, demonstrating a direct crossmodal influence of image statistics on flavour experience.

Multisensory Perception of Food Cues publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in multisensory perception of food cues across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Crossmodal correspondence: Systematic association between attributes in different sensory modalities (e.g., red–sweet).

Multisensory integration: Neural process by which inputs from multiple senses are combined into a unified percept.

Interoceptive cues: Internal sensory signals arising during food consumption (e.g., texture and mouthfeel).

Exteroceptive cues: External sensory signals perceived before or during food interaction (e.g., appearance and aroma).

Luminance distribution: Statistical variation of light intensity across a visual image, affecting texture perception.

References

1. Food color is in the eye of the beholder: the role of human trichromatic vision in food evaluation. Scientific Reports (2016).
2. Effects of varying the standard deviation of the luminance on the appearance of food, flavour expectations, and taste/flavour perception. Scientific Reports (2020).
3. The Influence of Packaging Color on Consumer Perceptions of Healthfulness: A Systematic Review and Theoretical Framework. Foods (2023).
4. A taste of things to come: The effect of extrinsic and intrinsic cues on perceived properties of beer mediated by expectations. Food Quality and Preference (2021).
5. Don't judge new foods by their appearance! How visual and oral sensory cues affect sensory perception and liking of novel, heterogeneous foods. Food Quality and Preference (2019).