Report from Eurosense 2020

Special mention – Lapo Pierguidi

This year Eurosense 2020 “A sense of innovation” was organized for the first time as an online event due to the difficulties in organizing an in-person meeting linked to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference was focused on innovative approaches to study sensory perception in relation to preference, choice, and other types of behaviour. Following the great success of Eurosense 2018, the coverage of topics included the contribution of sensory science as a multidisciplinary perspective. Different sessions were organized to cover a wide range of research topics including sensory for: “sustainability” and “individual differences” and other fields for sensory such as “measures beyond liking” and ” Implicit and explicit approaches”. Notwithstanding the novel online modality, the conference had a remarkable success also from  participation point of view, with over 700 delegates attending the sessions.

Furthermore, this year the conference was opened by an Early Career Researchers (ECR) Seminar organized by the E3S STUDENT & EARLY STAGE RESEARCHER GROUP, consisting of oral presentations. My experience at Eurosense 2020 started from here since one of my two submitted abstracts was selected as an oral communication for this seminar. It was a pleasure for me to participate in the ECR seminar as a presenter since only 14 presentations were selected from a worldwide pool of 130 abstracts. My presentation focused on the study of product elicited emotions and the effect of context as a function of different liking patterns among cocktail consumers. This presentation was already a great satisfaction for me as it gave me the opportunity to expose the results of my research to a wide audience giving me the opportunity to discuss and share some aspects of this research approach with many colleagues. My abstract also received a special mention by the European Sensory Science Society committee. Receiving this special mention was a great satisfaction for me as well as an incentive to keep investigating some aspects of sensory and consumer science that I believe could be interesting for scientific advancement in this field.

Thanks to the innovative online organization of the conference was also possible for delegates to participate in online poster presentations. This year I got two different poster presentations. The first poster was linked to the abstract selected for the ECR seminar while the second one was focused on the reasons behind the choice between healthy and unhealthy snacks. This latter study represents a research carried out in collaboration with the university where I’m currently working (Florence University) and the Wageningen university where I have spent my period abroad during my Ph.D. course.

For me, participating in Eurosense has been a great opportunity to virtually meet colleagues and share my research. I have appreciated a lot of talks by different speakers, and in particular, it was very interesting for me to learn more about research on the changes in consumer behavior during the pandemic as well as changes in the sense of smell and taste in Covid patients.

I came away from Eurosense 2020 very happy about this experience and I am thankful for the opportunity the organizers gave me to present my work. I look forward to attending the conference again in 2022 in Turku.

Lapo Pierguidi

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