Qualitative differences in the immediate recognition memory for wine and visual matrices.

Abstract

Objectives: The present study examined short-term recognition for gustatory stimuli (wines) and investigated the proposition that serial position effects are qualitatively equivalent across stimulus types (Ward et al., 2005). Design: Two experiments examined serial position effects for a single yes/no recognition task with gustatory (Experiment 1) and visual stimuli (Experiment 2). Methods: Two experiments were conducted (n=24 in each) each comprising 18 trials. Participants were presented with sequences of three wines (Experiment 1) or three matrices (Experiment 2). Each item was presented for five seconds with a five-second ISI (incorporating a palette cleanse). Following the three items, participants received a single recognition probe. Results: Recognition for wine revealed strong primacy with an indication of recency. In contrast, recognition for non-verbal stimuli (abstract matrices) revealed strong recency and no primacy. Conclusions: The primacy advantage reported for wines is consistent with the first item bias reported for wine preference judgments (Mantonakis et al., 2009). Furthermore, the qualitatively different serial position functions for gustatory stimuli (compared to non-verbal visual stimuli) is consistent with a model in which short-term memory for gustatory stimuli operate differently to that of other stimulus types.