Processing of Sweet, Astringent and Pungent Oral Stimuli in the Human Brain

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Taste and oral somatosensation are intimately related to each other from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system. Oral astringent sensation is thought to contain both gustatory and somatosensory components. In the present study, we compared the cerebral response to an astringent stimulus (tannin), with the response to one typical taste stimulus (sweet - sucrose) and one typical somatosensory stimulus (pungent - capsaicin) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of 24 healthy subjects. Three distributed brain sub-regions responded significantly different to the three types of oral stimulations: lobule IX of the cerebellar hemisphere, right dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus. This suggests that these regions play a major role in the discrimination of astringency, taste, and pungency.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)144-155
Number of pages12
JournalNeuroscience
Volume2023
Issue number520
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 24 Mar 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85151744278
Mendeley 0d9418e5-f596-303b-a9ee-baca67474768
WOS 001010952600001
ORCID /0000-0001-9713-0183/work/146645425

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • astringency, capsaicin, fMRI, gustation, tannin, taste, Humans, Astringents, Brain/diagnostic imaging, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Brain Mapping, Taste Perception/physiology, Taste/physiology, Astringency, Capsaicin, Tannin, Gustation, Taste

Library keywords