Understanding sensory-specific satiety in a snack context

Sensory-specific satiety (SSS) in humans is defined as a decrease in liking or a consumed food relative to other non-consumed items. Accordingly, decline of liking should be the same for a food eaten on its own or in the context of pre-consumption evaluations of other foods. However, some studies suggest that the size of the SSS effect is greater if the consumed item is eaten after evaluations of several foods than on its own, implying an element of contrast effect in SSS. Accordingly, three experiments tested whether manipulating the number and type (sweet vs. savoury) of uneaten foods assessed before consumption affected the extent to which SSS developed in a snack context. Female participants attended a single SSS test session with either a sweet (experiment 1, n = 56), savoury (experiment 2, n = 30), or both sweet and savoury snacks (experiment 3, n = 64). Experiment 1 suggested that the magnitude of SSS increased linearly with rising numbers of uneaten foods. In contrast, experiment 2 found no significant differences in magnitude of SSS between conditions. Experiment 3 found no clear effects of number of pre-test conditions on SSS, with some evidence of greater generalization from uneaten to eaten savoury foods. These experiments suggest SSS is a robust effect which is largely unaffected by contrast effects between eaten and uneaten foods, but SSS may be less reliably demonstrated where uneaten foods are too few or too similar to the eaten item.