The seventh season of Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” the first of the television series to air in color, revealed how color can change the experience of food. While Child had charmed audiences in black and white, seeing “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise” in color helped elevate the experience from merely entertaining to mouthwatering.
I am a psychologist who studies visual abilities. My work, through a serendipitous research journey into individual differences in food recognition, uncovered a unique role for color in emotional responses to food.
People vary in their ability to recognize food
This journey started when my students and I measured how people vary in their ability to recognize images of prepared food. Over the past 20 years, we and other researchers have learned that people vary more than originally suspected in how well they discriminate and identify objects, like birds, cars or even faces.
It seems obvious that some…
