Roughness Lingual Tactile Sensitivity

There is limited research on lingual tactile sensitivity and it is poorly understood how it relates to food perception. We developed a method to study tongue sensitivity to roughness. Participants were asked to lick sandpapers varying in particle sizes and determine which of two samples was rougher, as well as rate the roughness using a verbally – anchored line scale. Sensitivity measures were linked to demographics (age, sex, race) and anatomical (lingual taste papillae density) factors. The results show that there may be a possible effect of age on suprathreshold sensitivity--the older participants are the less sensitive they become--but the sample size needs to be bigger for the data to be statistically significant. Men may also require a smaller particle size in order to detect a just-noticeable-difference in their roughness threshold. With the currently small sample size there seems to be no influence from taste papillae density, ethnicity, smoker status, age, or gender on threshold and suprathreshold data. Potentially the results could be correlated with other lingual sensitivity tasks (e.g. letter recognition) and further used by the food industry to determine how consumers perceive and like food textures.No embargoAcademic Major: Food Science and Technolog