BACKGROUND Humans have an innate preference for sweet taste, but the degree of liking for sweet foods varies individually. OBJECTIVE The proportion of inherited sweet taste preference was studied. A genome-wide linkage analysis was performed to locate the underlying genetic elements in the genome. DESIGN A total of 146 subjects (32% men, 68% women) aged 18-78 y from 26 Finnish families eval...

The cortical processing of umami shows what makes it pleasant and appetitive. The pleasantness of umami reflects and is correlated with processing in the secondary taste cortex in the orbitofrontal cortex and tertiary taste cortex in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas processing in the primary (insular) taste cortex reflects physical properties such as intensity. However, glutamate presente...

Throughout human history, food consumption has been deeply tied to cultural groups. Past models of food preference have assumed that social concerns are dissociated from basic appetitive qualities—such as tastiness—in food choice. Providing a counter to this notion, we tested and found support for the novel idea that social identities can shape the evaluation of food pleasantness. Specifically,...

Aalto University, P.O. Box 11000, FI-00076 Aalto www.aalto.fi Author Mikko Viinikainen Name of the doctoral dissertation Representation of emotional valence in human brain Publisher School of Science Unit Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science Series Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 111/2012 Field of research Cognitive Science Manuscript submitt...

In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we evaluated the effect of self-relevance on cerebral activity and behavioral performance during an incidental encoding task. Recent findings suggest that pleasantness judgments reliably induce self-oriented (internal) thoughts and increase default mode network (DMN) activity. We hypothesized that this increase in DMN activity would re...

This paper revisits recognition of natural image pleasantness by employing deep convolutional neural networks and affordable eye trackers. There exist several approaches to recognize image pleasantness: (1) computer vision, and (2) psychophysical signals. For natural images, computer vision approaches have not been as successful as for abstract paintings and is lagging behind the psychophysical...

In this study, the comfort of the tools available to the driver are evaluated through the virtual simulation of a car interior on a Tanorama Powerwall. In a series of couple comparisons, 20 participants have been asked to judge both the visibility and the aesthetic pleasantness of a set of hazard buttons, differing in their coloration parameters. The results show that “visibility’ has a direct ...

Independent experimental manipulation of subjective intensity and hedonic tone is required if one wants to study their separate effects on brain activity and behavior. This is problematic because hedonic tone and subjective intensity are related, leading to a pleasantness change each time the stimulus intensity is altered. In the present study, a solution to this problem was explored by combini...