Gustatory Responses in the Alert Monkey.

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Taste is a very important sense because it is involved in food selection and preference, and related to hunger, ingestion, and nutritional aspects of behavior. Most studies of taste have involved rodents, which have aspects of physiology and behavior very different from humans, and there are few data on gustatory processing to compare human sensory capabilities with rodent physiology. This study utilizes a novel approach of chronic recording from a behaving animal to explore how activity in the cortex of a primate brain correlates to behavior. Response characteristics and functional organization of the cortex will be explored, to determine how well data from human psychophysical studies are matched by electrophysiological data. This novel approach will provide data important for chemosensory science, for comparing functional organization of gustatory cortex with other sensory cortical areas, and for further understanding how brain activity underlies perception and behavior.