Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Taste guides us toward nourishment and away from harm. Yet when we decide what to eat, taste only exists in memory, evoked by a cue. How the brain retrieves taste memories is almost entirely unknown. If memory re-creates experience, it should reproduce the brain’s activation while tasting, even in the absence of taste. We scanned participants while they formed and then retrieved associations between tastes and visual cues. The gustatory cortex was engaged during retrieval and distinguished among remembered tastes, but not using the patterns it had formed while tasting. Patterns persisted instead in lateral parietal cortex, distinguishing individual tastes, not just taste-categories. Activity in the amygdala covaried with this same parietal region and amygdala activity predicted which associations were retained. Taste memory is not simply a re-creation of sensory experience, but a distinct representation, outside the taste system, yet specific enough to guide what we choose to eat.
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221975647