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We Who Eats: Understanding Food Perception upon First Sight

Images of food has been making a ubiquitous presence thanks to social media. People would use the social media to share and communicate about food. Some users are even drawn to travel around the world just to experience local delicacies. Often, they rely on web information and images to identify how local delicacies look like and in certain cases, predict its taste. Many food outlets or tourism sector use food image to market local food requiring users to tap into their visual cognition and perception of what it represents. However, little exploration has been done to understand if image can indeed simulate food taste particularly in the initial interaction with the food image. Therefore, we were motivated to understand user perception on local delicacies upon the first sight of its image. We applied the case study approach where we focused on three ‘Sarawak Layer Cakes’ to compare user perception of the cakes’ taste. Using Instagram as image mediator, users were requested to create hashtags that depicts how the food might taste like from the image alone. The hashtags were then analysed using content analysis where we found that appearance, perceived flavour and perceived texture affects user perception differently with the appearance dimension significantly affects user perception.