Cognitive Neuroscience (INM-3), Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany.
Department of Neurology, University Hospital Cologne, and Medical Faculty, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2022 May 16;12(1):8056. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-12005-x.
Remembering a particular taste is crucial in food intake and associative learning. We investigated whether taste can be dynamically encoded, maintained, and retrieved on short time scales consistent with working memory (WM). We use novel single and multi-item taste recognition tasks to show that a single taste can be reliably recognized despite repeated oro-sensory interference suggesting active and resilient maintenance (Experiment 1, N = 21). When multiple tastes were presented (Experiment 2, N = 20), the resolution with which these were maintained depended on their serial position, and recognition was reliable for up to three tastes suggesting a limited capacity of gustatory WM. Lastly, stimulus similarity impaired recognition with increasing set size, which seemed to mask the awareness of capacity limitations. Together, the results advocate a hybrid model of gustatory WM with a limited number of slots where items are stored with varying precision.
记住特定的味道对于食物摄入和联想学习至关重要。我们研究了味道是否可以在与工作记忆（WM）一致的短时间尺度上进行动态编码、维持和检索。我们使用新颖的单一和多项目味识别任务表明，尽管存在重复的口-感觉干扰，单一味道仍可以可靠地识别，这表明其具有主动和弹性维持（实验 1，N=21）。当呈现多种味道时（实验 2，N=20），这些味道的维持分辨率取决于它们的序列位置，并且最多可以识别三种味道，这表明味觉 WM 的容量有限。最后，随着集合大小的增加，刺激相似性会损害识别，这似乎掩盖了对容量限制的意识。总的来说，这些结果支持了味觉 WM 的混合模型，其中有有限数量的插槽，其中以不同的精度存储项目。
