Charles Spence is an

experimental psychologist Experimental psychology is the work done by those who apply Experiment, experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ Research participant, human participants and Animal testing, anim ...

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. He is the head of the

Crossmodal Crossmodal perception or cross-modal perception is perception that involves interactions between two or more different sensory modalities. Examples include synesthesia, sensory substitution and the McGurk effect, in which Visual perception, vision a ...

Research group which specializes in the research about the integration of information across different sensory modalities. He also teaches Experimental Psychology to undergraduates at

Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. It began admitting men in 1994. The colle ...

. He is currently a consultant for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the crew

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

on the European Space Shuttle, and currently works on problems associated with the design of foods that maximally stimulate the senses, and with the effect of the indoor environment on mood, well-being, and performance. Spence has published more than 500 articles in scientific journals over the last decade. He has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the

British Psychological Society The British Psychological Society (BPS) is a representative body for psychologists and psychology in the United Kingdom. History It was founded on 24 October 1901 at University College London (UCL) as ''The Psychological Society'', the org ...

: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (; 22 July 1784 – 17 March 1846) was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the Sun to another star by the method ...

Research Award from the

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation () is a foundation that promotes international academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and abroad. Established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is funded by t ...

in Germany.Spence, C. (2007). Audiovisual multisensory integration. Acoustical science and technology, 28(2), 61-70.

Research

One of Spence's earliest and most notable experiments in the field of crossmodal food research was "The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips," published in the '' Journal of Sensory Studies'' in 2004. The experiment was the first to successfully show that food could taste different depending on changes in sound. In the experiment, Spence demonstrated that the pitch and volume of the noise made when biting into

Pringles Pringles is an American brand of stackable potato-based chips invented by Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1968 and marketed as "Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips". It is technically considered an Extruded food, extruded snack because of the manufac ...

chips affected people's perception of how fresh they were. Louder, higher-pitched crunch noises were rated by eaters to be 15% fresher on average than softer, lower-pitched crunch noises. Since then his research has established that the sight, touch and sound of food can have large effects on its perceived taste. Other findings include that strawberry mousse is perceived as 10% sweeter when eaten from a white container over a black one, that coffee drunk from white mugs tastes almost twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet as coffee drunk from a black mug, and that eaters perceive yogurt to be roughly 25% more filling when its plastic container weighs more.

References

External links

* Year of birth missing (living people) Living people English psychologists Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford Ig Nobel laureates {{UK-psychologist-stub