Programa

How odor can activate a taste perception: investigations on the flavor network | ¿Cómo el olor puede activar la percepción del gusto? Investigaciones sobre la red del sabor

Charlotte Sinding

Research Center for Taste and Feeding Behavior (CSGA - INRAE) - (France)

• The flavor is a mental representation of the food based on olfactory and taste inputs. While taste confers information on caloric value, the odor reveals the identity of the food. Interestingly, these two senses are not processed independently but strongly interact to form a unique perception: the flavor. We do not know when and where these two senses interact in the brain and part of the mechanisms that lead to flavor perception is still to unravel. These intricate interactions can lead some odors to enhance a taste perception (e.g., vanilla odor enhances sweetness). This phenomenon is called odor-induced taste enhancement (OITE). Although shared among individuals, we have shown that OITE is more effective in people living with obesity than normal-weight for some drinks. We further investigated the brain correlates of odor and taste interactions in people with normal-weight and highlighted that when odor and taste are presented together, in comparison to when presented separately, the later brain component activity is delayed (associated with superior brain areas). This result likely suggests that a feedback loop might amplify the brain activity from the primary gustatory cortex to produce OITE. The brain mechanisms of this phenomenon are further investigated with electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. 

Desarrollo de mapas sensoriales de aromas a partir de técnicas estadísticas multivariantes | Development of sensory maps of aromas based on multivariate statistical techniques

Manuel Zarzo Castelló

Departamento de Estadística e Investigación Operativa Aplicadas y Calidad, Universitat Politècnica de València - (Valencia, España) 

• Diferentes estudios sugieren que el número de dimensiones en la percepción olfativa es de unas 20-30. Dado el elevado número de dimensiones, describir la sensación que produce un determinado olor no resulta sencillo. Por esta razón, es complicado llegar a un consenso a la hora de clasificar olores, o bien desarrollar mapas sensoriales que pongan de manifiesto las similitudes y diferencias entre los descriptores utilizados a la hora de describir un determinado olor. Distintas bases de datos contienen información sobre el perfil olfativo de sustancias químicas o bien de perfumes comerciales. El análisis estadístico multivariante de diversas bases de datos olfativas disponibles en la bibliografía resulta de interés para: clasificar descriptores olfativos, clasificar perfumes, investigar el número de dimensiones del espacio olfativo, interpretar las dimensiones psicológicas relevantes de este espacio perceptual, desarrollar mapas sensoriales de olores en general y de perfumes en particular.

Language and Smell a spicy relationship | Lenguaje y olfato, ¿una relación sabrosa o insípida? 

Pablo Meyer Rojas
Manager Biological Analytics and Modeling team, IBM research

• The most common hypothesis regarding the relationship between language and smell is that because we are not good at recognizing smells, we therefore are not good at describing smells with words, and thus language is not adapted to describe smells. We show that we were able to build a neural network model that, based on the structure of any molecule, could predict how it would smell using 130 words. The words that we could best predict were garlic, intensity, fish, sweet, fruit, spices, smell of burning and flower. For the first time, we were able to build a model that was able to predict not only pleasure and intensity elicited by an odor, but also its semantic dimensions. The gist of it is that we did it with a model that used the relationship between words in a similar way to current large language models (such as chatGPT) that are used to predict which word is next in a sentence or to do translations. What else can we do with this? Can we tackle olfactory mixtures ? Diagnose diseases where smell is a target?

Ronda de discusión

Simposio Internacional sobre Cognición Sensorial 2023