Taste Behavior Changes With Time and Exposure
1 Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA
While animals consume tastes, they must first identify them and asses if the taste will cause sickness. The gustatory cortex (CG) is a region necessary for identifying taste novelty and taste danger (Lin et al., 2015). Exposure modulates changes in taste-naive animals. Specifically, neuron ensembles within the GC more accurately classify different tastes across 3 days of taste exposure (Flores et al., 2022). This suggests that tastes ‘develop’ but it is not understood without a behavioral correlate such as Attenuation of Neophobia (AN); rats increase their consumption to novel tastes across 3-4 days (Lin et al., 2012). To ask on what timescale this increase is occurring, one previous study has used a brief access task (BAT) to observe rapid changes in consumption in response to an artificial sweetener, saccharine, within a session (Monk et al., 2014). The BAT measures consumption with high temporal definition. Because saccharine has limited ethological validity, I reproduce these changes to a more naturally occurring taste, sucrose. Furthermore, to increase the generalizability AN within a session, I pooled BAT datasets presenting multiple tastes within one session. In both of these analyses, I found similar increases in within-session consumption of 3 palatable tastes sucrose, salt and saccharine. These results suggest that as rats experience tastes, their behavior changes rapidly. Disentangling satiation from any time-dependent changes requires alternating the time between taste trials in the BAT. This builds on previous work showing that taste responses, similar to other sensory systems, develop as a function of experience.