Do you read what you taste?
Preliminary results from BookExpoAmerica 2006
On May 19th and 20th, we were in Washington DC, at BookExpoAmerica 2006, Booth 526. We captured the attention of 200 of the attendees, who took precious time from touring the exhibits to sit down, take our survey, taste a LifeSaverTM peppermint, and tell us how strong they found it to be.
So far we have analyzed the surveys of 100 of the participants. Even with half the surveys entered into our database, the answer to the question "Do you read what you taste?" is a resounding YES!
A few examples:
- In our previous work, we found that people who were highly sensitive to the cooling effect of mint were more likely to become absorbed in and take pleasure from visual experience. Not only was this true for the BookExpoAmerica attendees, but sensitivity to the cooling sensation of mint was associated with an increased tendency to visualize scenes in books vividly, to 'hear' conversations of the characters, and to 'feel' textures, temperatures, and wind, even when these scenes were not described in detail.
- But the higher a person's sensitivity to the taste of the peppermint - and to the cooling effects of the mint in particular - the less likely he or she was to enjoy reading fiction!
- Recently, Olessia Blajenkova and her colleagues at Rutgers Unversity developed a new self-report imagery questionnaire, the Object-Spatial Imagery Qestionnaire (OSIQ) (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20:239-263. 2006). The purpose of the OSIQ is to discriminate between people who represent their world in the form of "colourful, pictorial, and high resolution images of individual objects" and those who represent their world in more schematic images, with an emphasis on spatial relations among objects. This questionnaire is much to long to be administered in our setting, but we took representative questions to include in our survey. In concordance with our expectations, people who found the cooling sensation of mint to be the strongest also had the highest scores on the object imagery scale items, while people who enjoyed how-to books tended to score highly on the spatial imagery scale.
Of course, we have to complete analyzing the data; there are many more findings waiting in the wings! And then we will go on to our next project, which will be to get a better handle on why these differences exist. Please contact us if you have questions about this or any other aspect of our work.
The goodie bags contained (among other things) a brochure about our work.
Note the seats -- they were tempting after a long walk through the exhibits! On the left, you can see the profile of a clipboard; it's held by one of our participants, who is enjoying one of the seats.
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