Insights into brain perceptions of the different taste qualities and hedonic valence of food via scalp electroencephalogram

Abstract

Investigating brain activity is essential for exploring taste-experience related cues. The paper aimed to explore implicit (unconscious) emotional or physiological responses related to taste experiences using scalp electroencephalogram (EEG). We performed implicit measures of tastants of differing perceptual types (bitter, salty, sour and sweet) and intensities (low, medium, and high). The results showed that subjects were partially sensitive to different sensory intensities, i.e., for high intensities, taste stimuli could induce activation of different rhythm signals in the brain, with α and θ bands possibly being more sensitive to different taste types. Furthermore, the neural representations and corresponding sensory qualities (e.g., “sweet: pleasant” or “bitter: unpleasant”) of different tastes could be discriminated at 250–1,500 ms after stimulus onset, and different tastes exhibited distinct temporal dynamic differences. Source localization indicated that different taste types activate brain areas associated with emotional eating, reward processing, and motivated tendencies, etc. Overall, our findings reveal a larger sophisticated taste map that accounted for the diversity of taste types in the human brain and assesses the emotion, reward, and motivated behavior represented by different tastes. This study provided basic insights and a perceptual foundation for the relationship between taste experience-related decisions and the prediction of brain activity.