9413025 Pritchard Taste is a critical sense for animal survival, determining what is good and what is not good to eat. Yet compared with our understanding of other sensory modalities like sight and hearing , we have only a rudimentary knowledge of the gustatory system. Sight, hearing and touch are centrally organized in a hierarchical fashion in the mammalian brain; in particular, the thalamus is a major brain region above the brainstem which processes and integrates sensory information before it gets to the level of the cortex. We have little comparable information on central processing in taste pathways. This project uses novel experiments with sophisticated behavioral tests to see what particular processing occurs in the brainstem, without the contributions from the thalamus. The unique approach will determine whether specific taste deficits represent a sensory loss, a change in behavioral motivation, or a perceptual deficit, each of which could influence taste- guided behavior. These results will provide needed fundamental advances in our understanding of taste; results will be important beyond chemosensory neuroscience, to cognitive and perceptual issues of brain function, and to the food industry.
