title: Temporal signatures of taste quality driven by active sensing.
abstract: Animals actively acquire sensory information from the outside world, with rodents sniffing to smell and whisking to feel. Licking, a rapid motor sequence used for gustation, serves as the primary means of controlling stimulus access to taste receptors in the mouth. Using a novel taste-quality discrimination task in head-restrained mice, we measured and compared reaction times to four basic taste qualities (salt, sour, sweet, and bitter) and found that certain taste qualities are perceived inherently faster than others, driven by the precise biomechanics of licking and functional organization of the peripheral gustatory system. The minimum time required for accurate perception was strongly dependent on taste quality, ranging from the sensory-motor limits of a single lick (salt, ∼100 ms) to several sampling cycles (bitter, >500 ms). Further, disruption of sensory input from the anterior tongue significantly impaired the speed of perception of some taste qualities, with little effect on others. Overall, our results show that active sensing may play an important role in shaping the timing of taste-quality representations and perception in the gustatory system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4400 Dustin.Graham@stonybrook.edu.
authors.forename: Dustin M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4400.
authors.forename: Chengsan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4400.
authors.forename: David L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Hill
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D018345:Mice, Knockout; D008822:Mice, Transgenic; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D013649:Taste / Q000502:physiology*; D055697:Taste Perception / Q000502:physiology*