Khorisantono Putu Agus, Veldhuizen Maria G, Seubert Janina
Division of Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 77, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mersin University, Mersin, Türkiye.
Nat Commun. 2025 Sep 12;16(1):8252. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63803-6.
During food consumption, tastes combine with retronasal odours to form flavour, which leads to a link so robust that retronasal odours can elicit taste sensations without concurrent taste stimulation. However, the cortical integration of these parallel sensory signals remains unclear. Here, we combine a flavour-binding paradigm and functional neuroimaging to test whether retronasal odorants evoke encoding patterns in the insula similar to those of their paired tastants. Healthy participants attend a familiarisation session with congruent sweet and savoury flavours followed by two functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) sessions where they separately receive the constituent tastants and odorants. Multivariate pattern analysis reveal classification of retronasal odours within the insula, exhibiting overlapping representations with their associated tastes, particularly in the ventral anterior insula. Additionally, we observe temporal drift in insular taste representations, paralleling findings in rodent gustatory cortex. These findings underscore the robust crossmodal influences of gustatory and retronasal olfactory processing that underpin the flavour percept.
在进食过程中，味觉与鼻后嗅觉相结合形成风味，这种联系非常紧密，以至于鼻后嗅觉可以在没有同时进行味觉刺激的情况下引发味觉感受。然而，这些并行感觉信号的皮质整合仍不清楚。在这里，我们结合风味结合范式和功能神经成像来测试鼻后气味剂是否会在脑岛中引发与它们配对的味觉刺激相似的编码模式。健康参与者先参加一个熟悉一致的甜味和咸味风味的环节，然后进行两个功能性磁共振成像（MRI）环节，在这两个环节中他们分别接受组成风味的味觉刺激和气味刺激。多变量模式分析揭示了脑岛内鼻后气味的分类，显示出与它们相关味觉的重叠表征，特别是在腹侧前脑岛。此外，我们观察到脑岛味觉表征的时间漂移，这与啮齿动物味觉皮层的研究结果相似。这些发现强调了味觉和鼻后嗅觉处理之间强大的跨模态影响，这些影响构成了风味感知的基础。
