Flavour through the lens of conflict: a proposed framework

For many, flavour is the quintessential multisensory experience. It emerges from synthesizing information across sensory modalities and temporal scales. Disparities between these cues are inevitable, and regulation is necessary to synthesize a unitary flavour percept, triggering hedonic and attentional responses, and ultimately liking. Although several frameworks address specific consequences of flavour incongruity, an integrative account unifying perceptual, attentional, hedonic, and adaptive responses remains poorly specified. Here, we explore whether the principles of conflict monitoring, originally developed to explain sensorimotor competition, can be extended to explain the dynamics of competition between flavour-related perceptual representations. We argue that brain mechanisms that monitor for, signal, and regulate discrepancies in information processing can help explain how incongruent flavour cues are resolved, how attention and hedonic responses are modulated, and how flavour representations are updated through experience. This framework is complementary with existing accounts based on predictive processing, causal inference, associative learning, and assimilation–contrast, by specifying when unresolved competition between flavour representations recruits attentional control and adaptive learning. Considering the role of conflict mechanisms in flavour can provide some unification across existing accounts and suggest avenues for research both in the laboratory as well as in the consumer industry.