title: A common gustatory and interoceptive representation in the human mid-insula.
abstract: The insula serves as the primary gustatory and viscerosensory region in the mammalian cortex. It receives visceral and gustatory afferent projections through dedicated brainstem and thalamic nuclei, which suggests a potential role as a site for homeostatic integration. For example, while human neuroimaging studies of gustation have implicated the dorsal mid-insular cortex as one of the primary gustatory regions in the insula, other recent studies have implicated this same region of the insula in interoception. This apparent convergence of gustatory and interoceptive information could reflect a common neural representation in the insula shared by both interoception and gustation. This idea finds support in translational studies in rodents, and may constitute a medium for integrating homeostatic information with feeding behavior. To assess this possibility, healthy volunteers were asked to undergo fMRI while performing tasks involving interoceptive attention to visceral sensations as well as a gustatory mapping task. Analysis of the unsmoothed, high-resolution fMRI data confirmed shared representations of gustatory and visceral interoception within the dorsal mid-insula. Group conjunction analysis revealed overlapping patterns of activation for both tasks in the dorsal mid-insula, and region-of-interest analyses confirmed that the dorsal mid-insula regions responsive for visceral interoception also exhibit strong responses to tastants.
authors.affiliation: Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74136.|Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74104.
authors.forename: Jason A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Avery
authors.affiliation: Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74136.|Department of Psychology, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74104.
authors.forename: Kara L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, 20892.
authors.forename: John E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Ingeholm
authors.affiliation: Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74136.
authors.forename: Kaiping
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Burrows
authors.affiliation: Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74136.|College of Engineering, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 73071.|Center for Biomedical Engineering, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 73071.
authors.forename: Jerzy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bodurka
authors.affiliation: Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74136.|Department of Community Medicine, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74104.
authors.forename: W Kyle
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Simmons
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006321:Heart / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012677:Sensation / Q000502:physiology*; D013270:Stomach / Q000502:physiology; D055697:Taste Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001743:Urinary Bladder / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: gustation; insula; interoception