Title
Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine.
Abstract
Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain-specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1111/cogs.12842
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Imagery,Olfaction,Vision,Taste,Wine expertise,Training
Journal
44
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5.0
0364-0213
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ilja Croijmans100.34
Laura J. Speed213.10
Artin Arshamian331.55
Asifa Majid41410.85