Mechanisms of Taste- & Taste-Olfaction Mixture Detection

描述（由申请人提供）：大多数食品和饮料都有“味道”（或者更恰当地说，“风味”），这些是来自几种感觉模式的神经输入的整合结果：味觉，或适当的味道；嗅觉;甚至是身体感觉（触觉，温度，有时辛辣或刺激）。此外，产生味觉和风味感知的大多数刺激都是由大量单个化学成分的混合物组成的，而混合物的感知最终取决于中枢神经机制，该机制将模式内部和模式之间产生的信号整合在一起。目前的研究重点是当刺激流过舌头或进入口腔时，人类对味觉混合物（味觉刺激的混合物）和味觉-嗅觉混合物（味觉和嗅觉刺激的混合物）的检测机制。在味觉和嗅觉味觉/风味刺激的阈值水平检测中，可能至少有四个神经通道可以独立运作。考虑到这一点，并且考虑到检测反映了信号与噪声的区别（信号检测理论），一系列实验将测试统计独立通道中心集成的定量模型的预测。这个模型，即整合模型，预测了激活独立通道的刺激产生的信号的部分求和。还测试了两种可供选择的定量模型。其中一种是完全独立的模型，它预测的是概率求和，这意味着求和比积分模型预测的要少；另一种选择，刺激总和，是一种假设刺激在单个通道内具有加性效应的模型，该模型通常比整合模型预测更大的总和。第一组实验测量了口腔对味觉和嗅觉混合刺激的敏感性。第二组实验测量对味觉刺激混合物的敏感度。第三组实验询问受试者是否能够使用概率求和来提高对味觉-嗅觉混合物的检测。第四组实验验证了一个假设，即当背景掩蔽物远高于阈值时，通道独立性在跨通道跨模态（味觉-嗅觉）掩蔽范式中会失效。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Most foods and beverages have 'tastes' (or, more appropriately, 'flavors'), and these result from the integration of neural inputs deriving from several sense modalities: gustation, or taste proper; olfaction; and even somatosensation (touch, temperature, sometimes pungency or irritation). Further, most stimuli that produce perceptions of taste and flavor consist of mixtures of large numbers of individual chemical constituents, and the perception of mixtures depends ultimately on central neural mechanisms that integrate signals arising within and among modalities. The present research focuses on mechanisms underlying the detection, by humans, of taste mixtures (mixtures of gustatory stimuli) and taste-olfactory mixtures (mixtures of gustatory and olfactory stimuli) when stimuli are flowed over the tongue or taken into the mouth. It is likely that at least four neural channels can operate independently in the threshold-level detection of gustatory and olfactory taste/flavor stimuli. Given this, and given that detection reflects discrimination of signal from noise (signal detection theory), a series of experiments will test the predictions of a quantitative model of central integration of statistically independent channels. This model, the integration model, predicts partial summation of signals arising from stimuli that activate independent channels. Tested also are two alternative quantitative models. One of these, a model of complete independence, predicts probability summation, which implies less summation than that predicted by the integration model; the other alternative, stimulus summation, is a model that assumes that stimuli have additive effects within a single channel, and this model typically predicts greater summation than does the integration model. The first set of experiments measures sensitivity to mixtures of gustatory and olfactory stimuli taken in the mouth. The second set of experiments measures sensitivity to mixtures of gustatory stimuli. The third set of experiments asks whether subjects are able to use probability summation to improve the detection of taste-olfaction mixtures. And the fourth set of experiments tests the hypothesis that channel-independence will fail in a paradigm of cross-channel cross modal, gustatory-olfactory) masking, when background maskers are well above threshold.