Creating psychometric scales for perceptual assessment of fruit juices' refreshing and thickness attributes.

Persons look for beverages to satisfy thirst (refresh) and feel fulfilled (thick). However, refreshing and thickness are concepts that lack a measurement instrument that captures an accurate judgment of consumers' perceptions. This research aims to propose a tool to assess consumers' refreshing and thickness expectations of fruit juices. Items were developed through a two-stage qualitative-exploratory study, followed by a quantitative study describing the scale's composition using an Item Response Theory approach. Hence, we suggest a set of items to consider when measuring both concepts from a perception task. Moreover, results show that thickness and refreshing are distinct and independent ideas. We provide a theoretical contribution defining each construct and recognizing the attributes that best describe refreshing and thickness for five different fruit juices. Our methodological contribution is creating a scale for each of the concepts. Practically, developing a thickness and refreshing scale is useful for product developers and marketers who expect to satisfy consumers' needs for soft drinks.

Code and data on the categorization of soft-drink bottles using image silhouettes.

This data article includes the visual stimuli used to test the categorization of a set of soft drink bottle silhouettes. Additionally, subjects' perceptual categorization was associated with each visual stimuli. The silhouette of the soft drink bottles was characterized by calculating the most common object shape measurements such as width, height and area and combining them with more complex and specific quantitative shape measurements such as the principal moment statistics. Finally, this data article includes the code for extracting these shape characteristics from image silhouettes. For interpretation and discussion, please see the original article entitled "Quantitative analysis of product categorization in soft drinks using bottle silhouettes" (Arboled and Arce-Lopera, 2015) [1].

The French, German, and Spanish sound of eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

A set of onomatopoeic expressions for eating fruits and vegetables is compared across subjects whose native language is Spanish, French, or German. Subjects chose the onomatopoeia that best represented the sound of eating a fruit or vegetable (celery, banana, strawberry, passion fruit, mango, apple, orange, and tomato). Results show there are onomatopoeias that have a higher frequency of response in one language compared to the others. Thus, it is possible to assume that depending on the language there is a better way to express haptic and auditory information associated to fruit and vegetable consumption. Moreover, and considering the three languages, results show there are three categories of responses based on the relative strength of the material (strong and medium strength, and soft). Thus, there is some consistency in the onomatopoeias that represent the sound of eating a fruit or a vegetable. To conclude, results differ by language, but they are consistent within a category of sound.