The capacity and organization of gustatory working memory

Remembering a particular taste is crucial in food intake and associative learning. We investigated whether taste can be dynamically encoded, maintained, and retrieved on short time scales consistent with working memory (WM). We use novel single and multi-item taste recognition tasks to show that a s...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2022-05, Vol.12 (1), p.8056-8056, Article 8056
Main Authors: Lim, Shirley Xue Li, Höchenberger, Richard, Ruda, Iryna, Fink, Gereon R., Viswanathan, Shivakumar, Ohla, Kathrin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/477
631/477/2811
Accuracy
Adaptation
Associative learning
Experiments
Food
Food intake
Food quality
Humanities and Social Sciences
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
multidisciplinary
Neurosciences
Recognition, Psychology
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Short term memory
Taste
Taste aversion learning
Taste stimuli
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Remembering a particular taste is crucial in food intake and associative learning. We investigated whether taste can be dynamically encoded, maintained, and retrieved on short time scales consistent with working memory (WM). We use novel single and multi-item taste recognition tasks to show that a single taste can be reliably recognized despite repeated oro-sensory interference suggesting active and resilient maintenance (Experiment 1, N = 21). When multiple tastes were presented (Experiment 2, N = 20), the resolution with which these were maintained depended on their serial position, and recognition was reliable for up to three tastes suggesting a limited capacity of gustatory WM. Lastly, stimulus similarity impaired recognition with increasing set size, which seemed to mask the awareness of capacity limitations. Together, the results advocate a hybrid model of gustatory WM with a limited number of slots where items are stored with varying precision.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-12005-x