Gustatory Responses in the Alert Monkey

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Relatively little is known about how the cortex of the brain processes information about taste in humans and primates. In fact, only a relative small percentage of nerve cells in the frontal cortex appear to be taste-responsive. Thus, taste input does not dominate the input to this portion of cortex in the same way that visual input dominates input to the posterior cortex. Much more information is needed in order to better understand how the highest levels of the brain receive and analyze taste information. The goals of this research are: (l) to define the total scope of activity in the taste regions of the cortex, (2) to describe the basic characteristics of nerve cells responding to taste, (3) to determine the basic principles that the taste system uses to identify different taste qualities, (4) to describe how similar the primate taste system is to the human taste system by comparing nerve cell responses to the perceptions that humans report when they taste the same solutions, and (5) to discover how various tastes may cause likes or dislikes in a perceptual sense.