Presentation Details
| Vector-based taste representations of food odours predict appetitive value Putu A Khorisantono1, Apostolia Filippopoliti1, Maria G Veldhuizen2, 3, Janina Seubert1, . 1Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden.2Mersin University, Mersin, Turkey.3Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey |
Abstract
Flavour perception arises from the integration of gustatory and olfactory signals, yet how learned taste-odour associations are represented in the brain and translated into appetitive behaviour remains poorly understood. Our prior work demonstrated that aromas acquire taste-like neural representations through flavour learning: using a flavour-binding paradigm and fMRI, we showed that tasteless aromas evoke activity patterns in the human insular cortex that overlap with those elicited by their paired tastants, particularly in the dysgranular and agranular insula. These findings established a shared and dynamic neural code for taste and retronasal olfaction, providing a cortical mechanism through which aromas acquire consummatory meaning. Building on this neural framework, the present pre-registered study extends taste-odour integration beyond retronasal perception to orthonasal food odours and examines how predicted taste properties modulate food wanting. Healthy volunteers completed a taste-rating session to derive individual sweet and savoury preference, followed by ratings of orthonasally delivered food odours along sweetness, savouriness and wanting dimensions. Mixed-effects modelling predicted odour-elicited food wanting from an interaction between individual taste liking and the expected taste properties of food odours. Moreover, a vector-based representation of odours in sweet-savoury space outperformed a scalar spectral model in predicting appetitiveness, with cross-validated generalisation across participants. Together, these findings link shared taste-odour neural coding in the insula to orthonasal odour-guided appetitive behaviour, highlighting how lifelong associative learning shapes food valuation and suggesting mechanisms through which sensory expectations influence dietary choices.
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