Fontanini Alfredo, Katz Donald B
Department of Psychology, Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1170:403-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.03922.x.
Our perception of the sensory world is constantly modulated by the environment surrounding us and by our psychological state; each encounter with the same stimulus can in fact evoke very different perceptions. This phenomenological richness correlates well with the plasticity and the state-dependency observed in neural responses to sensory stimuli. This article reviews recent results on how the processing of sensory inputs varies depending on the internal state of the animal. Specifically it focuses on the gustatory system and on data showing that levels of attention and expectation modulate taste processing and gustatory cortical activity in meaningful ways. Mounting experimental evidence suggesting that expectation-dependent changes in gustatory cortical activity result from changes in the coupling between the amygdala and the cortex will also be discussed. The results presented here begin to paint a complex picture of taste, which goes beyond the framework of classical coding theories.
我们对感官世界的感知不断受到周围环境和心理状态的调节；事实上，每次面对相同的刺激都可能引发截然不同的感知。这种现象学上的丰富性与在对感官刺激的神经反应中观察到的可塑性和状态依赖性密切相关。本文综述了关于感官输入处理如何因动物内部状态而异的最新研究成果。具体而言，它聚焦于味觉系统以及表明注意力和期望水平以有意义的方式调节味觉处理和味觉皮层活动的数据。越来越多的实验证据表明，味觉皮层活动中依赖期望的变化是由杏仁核与皮层之间耦合的变化引起的，这一点也将进行讨论。这里呈现的结果开始描绘出一幅复杂的味觉图景，它超越了经典编码理论的框架。
