Department of Anatomical Sciences and Neurobiology, University of Louisville, KY 40202, United States.
Department of Anatomical Sciences and Neurobiology, University of Louisville, KY 40202, United States.
Brain Res. 2018 Dec 15;1701:189-195. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2018.09.019. Epub 2018 Sep 19.
Eating a new food is a unique event that guides future food choices. A key element for these choices is the perception of flavor (odor-taste associations), a multisensory process dependent upon taste and smell. The two primary cortical areas for taste and smell, gustatory cortex and piriform cortex, are thought to be crucial regions for processing and responding to odor-taste mixtures. To determine how previous experience impacts the primary chemosensory cortices, we compared the expression of the immediate early gene, c-Fos, between rats presented with a taste, an odor, or an odor-taste mixture for the first-time with rats that had many days of prior experience. Compared to rats with prior experience, we found that first-time sampling of all three chemosensory stimuli led to significantly greater c-Fos expression in gustatory cortex. In piriform cortex, only the novel chemosensory stimuli containing odors showed greater c-Fos expression. These results indicate that prior experience with taste, odor, or odor-taste stimuli habituates responses in the primary chemosensory cortices and adds further evidence supporting gustatory cortex as a fundamental node for the integration of gustatory and olfactory signals.
进食新食物是一种独特的事件，它指导着未来的食物选择。这些选择的一个关键因素是对味道的感知（气味-味道的关联），这是一个依赖于味觉和嗅觉的多感官过程。味觉和嗅觉的两个主要皮质区域，味觉皮质和梨状皮质，被认为是处理和响应气味-味道混合物的关键区域。为了确定先前的经验如何影响主要的化学感觉皮质，我们比较了首次呈现味觉、气味或气味-味道混合物的大鼠与有多天经验的大鼠之间即时早期基因 c-Fos 的表达。与有经验的大鼠相比，我们发现，首次对所有三种化学感觉刺激的采样都导致味觉皮质中 c-Fos 的表达显著增加。在梨状皮质中，只有含有气味的新化学感觉刺激显示出更大的 c-Fos 表达。这些结果表明，味觉、气味或气味-味道刺激的先前经验使主要化学感觉皮质的反应习惯化，并进一步证明了味觉皮质作为味觉和嗅觉信号整合的基本节点。
