Demystifying wine expertise:olfactory threshold,perceptual skill and semantic memory in expert and novice wine judges

摘要

We investigated recognition and identification of wine-relevant odours as a function of domain-specific expertise.Eleven wine experts and 11 wine novices participated in tasks measuring olfactory threshould,odour recognition,odour identification,and consistency of odour naming.Twenty-four wine-relevant odorants were sampled orthonasally by each participant in the semanti(identification;consistency of naming) and episodic(recognition) memory takss.Results showed superior olfactory recognition by expert wine judges,despite their olfactory sensitivity and bias measures being similar to those of novices.Contary to predictions basedon reports of an association between odour memory and semantic processing,wine experts did not perform beter than novices on the verbal memory tasks.Further,ability to recognize odours and ability to name odours werenot positively correlated,although the novices' data showed a trend in this direction.The results imply that the source of superior odour recognition in wine experts was not enhanced semantic memory and linguistic capabilities for wine-relevant odours.One interpretation of the data is that wine experts were less susceptible than wine novices to verbal overshadowing.When forced to identify the odorants,experts' superior perceptual skills protected them from verbal interference,whereas novices' generated verbal representations of the odours were emphasiszed at hte expenseof the odorant itself.This has implications for training in wine-evaluation skills.