Abstract
Sensory evaluation can be broadly classified to analytic methods and a preference surveys. In the analytic methods, especially, since the panels are used as measuring instruments, sufficient inspection abilities are required to panels. The inspection abilities of a panel depend on various external factors or panel's attributes such as sex, age, etc. Then it is important to consider the attributes which have influence to the panel's inspection abilities. After we analyzed them, it is able to select appropriated panel to examination. The characteristics of panel's appear as the shapes of judgment characteristic functions. Therefore, by analyzing the shapes of judgment characteristic functions of the panels, it is able to evaluate the inspection ability of the panels. In this study, we focus on the difference of judgment characteristic function among panels. Then, we propose the method to evaluate obtaining panel's inspection abilities. Two kinds of evaluation indexes, “the judgment dispersion” and “the resolution” are defined from panel's characteristic functions of judgment. Simulation shows the validities of these evaluation indexes. Consequently, it may be clear that it is able to evaluate the inspection abilities of panels by the proposed evaluation indexes. Then, the evaluation indexes are applied to two actual experiments. From the first experiment, comparison of chroma saturation, we changed information which given to each panels, to analyze the difference of inspection abilities of panels. This experiment shows that the selection of suited information for experiment becomes easier by using proposed evaluation indexes. In the second experiment, the comparison of likeness of pearl, we analyzed the influences of sex and given knowledge of panel. This experiment shows the possibility to classify panels that have suitable inspection abilities, easily by using proposed evaluation indexes.
