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4. M. Laureati, E. Pagliarini, 2008: Il ruolo della memoria nello studio del consumatore, IIConvegno SISS di Scienze Sensoriali, 30 giugno-1 luglio:Memory plays a fundamental role in food choice. At the critical moment of a choice, consumers choose to buy aproduct rather than another on the basis of memories for experiences they had with that or a similar product.Food memory is a kind of implicit memory, based on an incidental learning of the enory properties of a food. Infact, it is extremely unusual that when eating we consciously decide to remember a food. Recently, it has beenproposed an implicit paradigm to study food memory in conditions similar to those happening in everyday life.Such paradigm consist of inviting people to the lab under a false pretence (i.e. studying hunger feeling) and tooffer them a meal containing different items among those a target food. The target is the only food for whichmemory will be tested later. The crucial feature of this paradigm is that, in order to ensure incidental learning ofthe target, people are not asked to memorize anything but just to consume the food, and in accordance with thefalse pretence, to rate they hunger feeling over the day. After a given retention interval, the same consumers areinvited again to the lab and unexpectedly asked to perform a memory test. Participants are presented with thetarget and several distractors (i.e. slightly modified version of the target), and for each sample, they have to indicatewhether this sample has been tasted previously or not. This work in intended as a critical review of the mostrecent studies on sensory memory to outline both the basic characteristics, which characterize sensory memorymechanisms, and the various factors (i.e. age, sex, liking, and culture), which affect incidental learning of foodproducts. Understanding of mechanisms, through which food properties are recalled, can provide interesting implicationsfor companies in both marketing sector and development of new products.5. M. Laureati, E. Pagliarini, O. Calcinoni, M. Bidoglio, 2006: Sensory acceptability of traditionalpreparations by elderly people, Food quality and Preference 17, 43-52.People’s food choice progressively change with aging. In particular, elderly people show a decrease in the pleasantnessassociated with food intake as a result of both physiological and psychological factors. The aims of thiswork were to investigate the most important aspects related to food for the elderly and to determine whetherthere is an evolution in food preferences during life course. This study involved 48 (36 females and 12 males) institutionalisedelderly people aged between 57 and 98 (mean age 82.5). Subjects were selected for their physiologicaland cognitive ability to carry out the evaluation. In the first step of this work a focus group was carriedout using seven institutionalised elderly people. It was shown that the basic criteria associated with food choicewere: simple-cooking, tradition and sensory aspects. In the second step subjects rated the liking of 11 coursesusing a nine-point hedonic scale. The 11 first courses were selected to include dishes that could plausibly beevaluated as traditional Italian first courses, simple-cooked/familiar first courses, simple-cooked/unfamiliar firstcourses and complicated -cooked/unfamiliar first courses, according to the observations drawn from focus group.The first courses preferred by elderly people were found to be those classified as simple-cooked/unfamiliar andcomplicated -cooked/unfamiliar dishes. Finally subjects answered a questionnaire to investigate whether therewas a relationship between the variables obtained from the focus group and food preferences for a particular firstcourse by elderly people.SISTAL - SOCIETA’ ITALIANA DI SCIENZE E TECNOLOGIE ALIMENTARIDipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agroalimentari, Università degli Studi della TusciaVia San Camillo de Lellis, 01100 ViterboTel.: 0761- 35 74 94/7 , Fax: 0761- 35 74 98, e-mail: mmoresi@unitus.it221