Odd versus even? An investigation on the impact of number of food items on plating preferences
Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction
- Keywords
- EYE APPEAL, FOOD AESTHETICS, PLATING, VISUAL PRESENTATION, ODD VS. EVEN, GASTROPHYSICS, FOOD LIKING
- Copyright
- © 2015 Woods et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Odd versus even? An investigation on the impact of number of food items on plating preferences. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1390v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1390v1
Abstract
We report on the results of a series of large-scale computer-based preference tests (conducted at The Science Museum in London and online) that evaluated for the first time the widely-held belief in kitchens that food should be plated in odd rather than even numbers of elements on the plate in order to maximize the eye appeal of a dish. Participants were presented with pairs of plates of food showing odd versus even number of seared scallops (3 vs. 4), arranged in a line or as a polygon, on either a round or square white plate. No consistent evidence for a preference for 3 or 4 number of food items was found. The implications of these results are discussed.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.