TITLE:
Brain Response to Aversive Taste for Investigating Taste Preference
AUTHORS:
Chenghong Hu, Yoshitada Katagiri, Yoshiko Kato, Zhiwei Luo
KEYWORDS:
Electroencephalogram (EEG); Near-Infrared Hemoencepalogram (NIR-HEG); Evoked Potential; Bitter and Sour Taste; Taste Preference
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science,
Vol.4 No.1,
January
24,
2014
ABSTRACT: To clarify the intrinsic food
preference mechanism, we investigated brain neurophysiological responses to unpleasant gustatory
stimuli using electroencephalogram (EEG) and near-infrared hemoencepalogram (NIR-HEG) simultaneously. A conventional delayed response task based on Go/Nogo
paradigm was adopted to extract real brain response
components from spontaneous background signals. We found excessive evoked EEG
potential responses to both bitter
and sour stimuli, while we didn’t find excessive changes in purified water
condition. These
potentials appeared before P3, hence, they potentially predicted unconscious
attention to the gustatory stimuli. We also identified a late contingent
negative variation (CNV) and corresponding P3 for sour stimulus. In addition, NIR-HEG responses showed relative changes
for every stimulus and we considered that these NIR-HEG signal changes were attributed to the prefrontal cortex activity for
regulating negative emotional valence against aversive tastes typically
including sour and bitter. In spite of limitation to timing accuracy of taste
presentations, the early markers found in this study could be fundamentals for
investigating individual food preference.