While there is a growing body of attention to the diversity of cognitive styles among individuals, that has yet to be directly applied to sensory and consumer sciences. This study was aimed at identifying how divergent analytic and holistic cognitive styles can affect individuals' food-related experiences. Participants were classified into either analytic or holistic cognitive style groups based on their scores on the Analysis-Holism Scale. Focus group interviews were conducted to identify group differences with respect to three aspects of food-related experiences: (a) shopping for, (b) preparing, and (c) consuming food. The results revealed that analytic consumers focused more on individual ingredients, separate meal portions, and singular important food attributes, while holistic consumers focused more on overall impressions, entire meal portions, and multiple food attributes as being important. In conclusion, this study sheds lights on how cognitive styles can modulate consumers' food-related experiences in everyday life. Practical applicationsPrior analytic-holistic research has highlighted how these two consumer groups can exhibit different processing and interpretations of identical situations. By utilizing psychology theory in the applied setting of sensory evaluation, it has been detailed how analytic and holistic groups that co-exist in a single population can provide significantly different results in response to food samples in everyday life. Analyticholistic cognitive styles should therefore be taken into consideration when conducting consumer-oriented sensory evaluation and product development to achieve better understanding of and predict consumer response and behavior toward food products.

Sensory perception is understood to be a complex area of research that requires investigations from a variety of different perspectives. Although researchers have tried to better understand consumers’ perception of food, one area that has been minimally explored is how psychological cognitive theories can help them explain consumer perceptions, behaviors, and decisions in food-related experiences. The concept of cognitive styles has existed for nearly a century, with the majority of cognitive style theories existing along a continuum with two bookends. Some of the more common theories such as individualist-collectivist, left-brain-right-brain, and convergent-divergent theories each offered their own unique insight into better understanding consumer behavior. However, these theories often focused only on niche applications or on specific aspects of cognition. More recently, the analytic-holistic cognitive style theory was developed to encompass many of these prior theoretical components and apply them to more general cognitive tendencies of individuals. Through applying the analytic-holistic theory and focusing on modern cultural psychology work, this review may allow researchers to be able to answer one of the paramount questions of sensory and consumer sciences: how and why do consumers perceive and respond to food stimuli the way that they do?

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Ambient scents at retail stores have been found to modulate customer perceptions and attitudes toward retail products and stores. Although ambient scent effects have also been observed in restaurant settings, little is known about the scent-related influences of restaurant wait staff on patron perception and behavior. This study aimed to determine whether olfactory cues from restaurant wait staff can affect patrons’ dining experiences and interpersonal behavior with respect to menu choice, flavor perception, overall liking of meal items, meal satisfaction, consumption amount, and tip amount for wait staff. A total of 213 adults with no olfactory impairments were asked to select and consume one of four chicken meat menu items: baked, broiled, fried, and smoked chicken, in a mock restaurant setting, under one of the three most likely scents of wait staff: congruent (smoky barbecue scent), fragrance (perfume scent), and no scent (control) applied to fabric aprons of wait staff. The results showed that menu choice and flavor perception of chicken meat items did not differ in the presence of the three scent conditions. The effects of wait staff scents on overall liking of chicken meat items, meal satisfaction, and tip amount for wait staff were found to differ as a function of patron gender. Female patrons gave higher ratings of overall liking and meal satisfaction under the fragrance scent condition than under the no scent condition, while male patrons showed no effect with respect to overall liking and an opposite result in the meal satisfaction. Female patrons gave larger tips to wait staff under the congruent scent condition than under the no scent condition, while male patrons exhibited no effect. Patrons also were found to consume chicken meat items the least under the congruent scent condition. In conclusion, this study provides new empirical evidence that wait staff scents at restaurants can affect patrons’ dining experiences and interpersonal behavior and that the effects of such scents vary as a function of patron gender.