No comprehensive language exists that describes the experience of touch. Three experiments were conducted to take steps toward establishing a touch lexicon. In Experiment I, 49 participants rated how well 262 adjectives described sensory, emotional and evaluative aspects of touch. In Experiment II, participants rated pairwise dissimilarities of the most descriptive words of the set. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions representing semanticperceptual spaces underlying the words resulted in a touch perception task (TPT) consisting of 26 'sensory' attributes (e.g., bumpiness) and 14 'emotional' attributes (e.g., pleasurable). In Experiment III, 40 participants used the TPT to rate unseen textured materials that were moved actively or received passively against the index fingerpad, volar forearm, and two underarm sites. MDS confirmed similar semantic-perceptual structures in Experiments II and III. Factor analysis of Experiment III data decomposed the sensory attribute ratings into factors labeled Roughness, Slip, Pile and Firmness, and the emotional attribute ratings into Comfort and Arousal factors. Factor scores varied among materials and sites. Greater intensity of sensory and emotional responses were reported when participants passively, as opposed to actively, received stimuli. The sensitivity of the TPT in identifying body site and mode of touch-related perceptual differences affirms the validity and utility of this novel linguistic/perceptual tool.

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This study was conducted to evaluate a new shearing method for the determination of poultry meat tenderness. Breast fillets were deboned at various postmortem times (0.25 to 24 h) to yield a vast array of tenderness levels. A trained descriptive panel was used to evaluate samples for attributes including initial hardness and chewdown hardness; instrumental measurements included Allo-Kramer (AK) and razor blade (RB) shear and laser sarcomere length determination. The RB shear method exhibited a higher correlation to sensory attributes than the AK method, suggesting that the new razor blade shear method is more advantageous in predicting poultry meat tenderness than the standard AK shear method. This new method not only has a higher sensory predictive value, but also requires shorter sample preparation time than the AK shear test because it is conducted on intact fillets.

Regression models were established to predict sensory tenderness of broiler pectoralis major muscles from instrumental shear values. Birds were processed and the breasts were removed at one of nine postmortem (PM) deboning times: 0.25, 1.25, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 6.0 and 24.0 h. A seven‐member trained panel evaluated the cooked samples for initial hardness, cohesiveness, moisture release, hardness of mass, cohesiveness of mass and number of chews. A 74‐member consumer panel was used to evaluate the samples for acceptance of overall texture and tenderness, appropriateness of juiciness and tenderness, and intensity of tenderness. The samples were analyzed using three instrumental shear tests (Allo–Kramer [AK], Warner–Bratzler [WB] and razor blade [RB]). Shear values and sensory scores were significantly affected by PM deboning time. Shear values correlated well with descriptive sensory attributes (R2 = 0.57 − 0.89) and consumer sensory attributes (R2 = 0.76 − 0.96). Descriptive sensory tenderness (hardness) was predicted better by the RB test, while consumer tenderness was predicted well equivalently by all three shear tests. As the RB test is simple and rapid, it is recommended that it be evaluated by the poultry industry as a quality control method.