Description:

The Department of Neuroscience Welcomes Dr. Arianna Maffei, PhD

Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

Taste experience early in life appear to influence food choices in adulthood. However, how taste preferences are established early in life and the circuit mechanisms that regulate them in adulthood have not been investigated. The affective component of taste, whether it is pleasant or aversive, can also be modulated by learning, indicating that taste preference is plastic throughout life, although how this plasticity influences eating behaviors is unclear. 

The gustatory cortex is involved in the detection and encoding of both sensory and emotional (hedonic) aspects of taste. Thus, it is an ideal model circuit to investigate the mechanisms and plasticity regulating taste preference and to determine how preference influences eating behaviors.  As taste guides feeding behaviors in all mammalian species, many of the mechanisms regulating the gustatory system are shared across species. 

I will present experimental evidence for the presence of a critical period for the development of taste preferences and discuss the circuit underpinning for the association of the identity of a taste with its hedonic value. I will then show how plasticity can modify the hedonic value of a taste by changing it from pleasurable to aversive and our current evidence about the mechanisms for this palsticity. The results of this work have important implications for our understanding of taste perception and taste guided behaviors. More broadly, they also inform us about how our perception of a sensory stimuli is modulated by their affective dimensions.