The sense of taste is a key component of the sensory machinery, enabling the evaluation of both the safety as well as forming associations regarding the nutritional value of ingestible substances. Indicative of the salience of the modality, taste conditioning can be achieved in rodents upon a single pairing of a tastant with a chemical stimulus inducing malaise. This robust associative learning...

Pistachio powder is a product used today in confectionery, ice cream, pistachio paste and other foods. Considering the higher rate of spoilage and oxidation in pistachio powder, developing methods to increase the shelf-life of this product is therefore important. In this study the effect of  freezing and vacuum packaging on the quality characteristics of pistachio powder during storage was inve...

OBJECTIVE Medical weight loss could change sweet taste threshold and preferences. The decrease in sweet taste preferences may, in turn, help in the maintenance of weight loss. This study examined the association between sweet taste preferences at baseline and weight change during a medical weight management programme and the impact of diet-induced weight loss on sweet taste preferences. METHO...

The taste cortex in the anterior insula provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature, and texture of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. One synapse on, in the orbitofrontal cortex, these sensory inputs are combined by associative learning with olfactory and visual inputs for some neurons, and these neurons encode food...

The amygdala processes multiple, dissociable properties of sensory stimuli. Given its central location within a dense network of reciprocally connected regions, it is reasonable to expect that basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons should produce a rich repertoire of dynamical responses to taste stimuli. Here, we examined single BLA neuron taste responses in awake rats and report the existence of t...

How does selective attention to affect influence sensory processing? In an fMRI investigation, when subjects were instructed to remember and rate the pleasantness of a taste stimulus, 0.1 M monosodium glutamate, activations were greater in the medial orbitofrontal and pregenual cingulate cortex than when subjects were instructed to remember and rate the intensity of the taste. When the subjects...

In primates, stimuli to sensory systems influence motivational and emotional behavior via neural relays to the orbitofrontal cortex. This article reviews studies on the effects of stimuli from multiple sensory modalities on the brain of humans and some other higher primates. The primate orbitofrontal cortex contains the secondary taste cortex, in which the reward value of taste is represented. ...

Dietary nutrients play a significant part in determining growth rate and meat yield. It is known that the compositions of protein and total amino acids of meat are invariable by feeding treatments, hence the meat taste is considered to be invariable. However, the relationship of taste components of meat with nutrients is not fully elucidated, and there have been few reports on the effect of fee...

Both the World Health Organization and the International Obesity Task Force have classified the prevalence of obesity as a global epidemic. The primary causes of obesity are sedentary lifestyles and high-fat diets. Such diets are preferred due to their high palatability. Fats are broken down into free fatty acids, such as linoleic and oleic acids. In order to determine the neural pathway respon...

This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not have a pre-existing sense of whether an experience is good or bad—even when they have experienced a sample of i...