Chemosensory processing in the taste-reward pathway

Although the act of eating is voluntary, its initiation depends on several factors including its taste and the animal's internal state as related to hunger or satiety. These factors, together with the food's hedonic value, will determine whether food will be ingested. The taste of food will depend on the activation of receptors located on taste cells but also on the expectation of what it will taste like. For these reasons, it is important to investigate, in behaving animals, the neural correlates of feeding behaviour in the taste-reward pathway. Here we review particular coding strategies, present experiments using freely licking rodents with chronically implanted arrays of electrodes throughout the taste-reward pathway to investigate the changes that occur when animals learn to discriminate among tastants and after they are ingested. In summary, we found that gustatory processing does not only depend on the input from the oral cavity but on expectation, learning, and post-ingestive effects. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.