Panelists' performances and strategies in paper based and computer based projective mapping

Projective Mapping has recently attracted a lot of attention and the main sensory data acquisition software packages have developed interfaces to collect projective mapping data. However, the comparison between paper and computer based projective mapping has never been reported. The objectives of this research were to 1) compare the consensus maps and panelists' performances for paper and computer based projective mapping and 2) analyze the panelists' strategies while performing either tasks. In the first part of the study, 32 panelists were asked to perform both paper and computer based projective mapping on 8 beer samples. In a second part of the study, 10 panelists were asked to repeat the tasks whilst “thinking aloud” their strategy. There was no significant difference in panelists' performance as assessed by the People Performance Index (PPI) between the paper and computer tasks. The consensus maps obtained were similar with respect to sample groupings, RV coefficients and variation explained by the first 2 dimensions. Individual panelists adopted similar strategies on paper and computer but strategies differed greatly between panelists.