Answer:
The cinnamon flavor that Mary Beth felt was due to an amount of cinnamon placed on the cookies that was only enough to reach her absolute threshold for taste.
Step-by-step explanation:
Absolute threshold is a very recurrent term in psychophysics to describe a situation where a factor is induced in minimal amounts to cause a stimulus, a sensation that is received by the brain with low intensity, but it is not lost on it.
In the question above, we can see that Mary Beth felt a slight cinnamon flavor in her cookies. The taste was not strong and well defined, but she could feel it in some bites and not in others. This means that the amount of cinnamon placed on the biscuit was the minimum amount capable of provoking a sensation of cinnamon flavor, but a weak and ill-defined sensation.