This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2018
Electrophysiological signatures of taste quality coding
Electrophysiological signatures of taste quality coding
The taste system provides important information about the edibility and makro-nutrient content of a food via differentiation between taste qualities. Specific receptors on the tongue are activated by chemicals signifying a taste quality before the signal is conveyed to the brain. How this peripheral...
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Personal Name(s): | Ohla, Kathrin (Corresponding author) |
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Contributing Institute: |
Kognitive Neurowissenschaften; INM-3 |
Imprint: |
2018
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Conference: | XXXIX Annual Meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences, Bonita Springs, Florida (USA), 2017-04-29 - 2017-04-29 |
Document Type: |
Abstract |
Research Program: |
(Dys-)function and Plasticity |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
The taste system provides important information about the edibility and makro-nutrient content of a food via differentiation between taste qualities. Specific receptors on the tongue are activated by chemicals signifying a taste quality before the signal is conveyed to the brain. How this peripheral signal is used by the central nervous system to encode taste quality is largely unknown. Taste qualities have been shown to differ in behavioral response times in humans and rodents yet the relevance of these latency differences remains unclear. We investigated the spatio-temporal properties of taste quality representations in the human cortex and whether these representations are used for perceptual decisions during different tasks. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analyses of head-surface electrophysiological brain responses evoked by tasting salty, sweet, sour, and bitter tasting solutions revealed that global neuronal response patterns allow to decode which tastant participants tasted on a given trial. Taste quality information was largely limited to the delta and theta frequency bands (<8 Hz) in line with recent findings from local field potentials in the rat. Moreover, taste quality decoding was successful as soon as the earliest taste evoked response was observed highlighting that quality is encoded early during taste processing. Quality-specific differences in decoding onset were more pronounced during fast-paced tasks and predictive for behavioral response latencies suggesting that neural response latencies reflect processing speed in a task-dependent. Together, the findings suggest flexible neural gustatory coding predictive for taste-related decision-making. |