This provides an outline of things you should be thinking about in organizing your presentations for class. As your presentations will provide practice for your second year presentations, job market papers, and future seminars, I have directed the outline towards seminar presentations, and at points mention you might adjust presentations for changes in circumstance and audience. What appears be...

The tongue is the principal organ that provides sensory information about the quality and quantity of chemicals in food. Other information about the temperature and texture of food is also transduced on the tongue, via extragemmal receptors that form branches of the trigeminal, glossopharyngeal, and vagal nerves. These systems, together with information from the gastrointestinal (GI) system, in...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of front-of-pack labels on taste perception and use of table salt for currently available and sodium-reduced soups. DESIGN Within-subject design. SETTING Sensory laboratory. SUBJECTS Participants (n 50, mean age 34.8 (sd 13.6) years) were randomly served nine soups (250 ml each) across 3 d. Servings differed in: (i) health label (i.e. no health label, r...

Food tastes better and people eat more of it when eaten with company than alone. Although several explanations have been proposed for this social facilitation of eating, they share the basic assumption that this phenomenon is achieved by the existence of co-eating others. Here, we demonstrate a similar "social" facilitation of eating in the absence of other individuals. Elderly participants tas...

Preferences over consumption and leisure play no role in the standard optimal tax model, which attributes all variation in earnings to differences in income-earning ability. We show how to incorporate these preferences, which like ability are publicly unobservable, into the standard model in a tractable way. In this more general model, the policy designer must guess at the relative importance o...

We consider theoretically and empirically the allocation of time and money within the household. The novelty of our empirical work is that we have a survey which provides information on both time use and the allocation of some goods within the household, for the same households. Thus we can consider whether a partner who enjoys more leisure also receives more consumption, which looks like the o...

Past experiences and social forces have been incorporated into tastes in order to analyze various microeconomic issues. We use these “extended preferences” to model the making of standard-of-living aspirations and study their effect on macroeconomic variables. We concentrate first on consumption behavior when there is habit formation. Such behavior is in accordance with several empirical facts ...

Vision provides a primary sensory input for food perception. It raises expectations on taste and nutritional value and drives acceptance or rejection. So far, the impact of visual food cues varying in energy content on subsequent taste integration remains unexplored. Using electrical neuroimaging, we assessed whether high- and low-calorie food cues differentially influence the brain processing ...

Genetic approaches are rapidly yielding new information about our sense of taste. This information comes from both molecular studies of genes encoding taste receptors and other taste-signaling components, and from studies of inherited variation in taste abilities. Our understanding of bitter taste has advanced by combined information from discovery and study of the TAS2R family of taste recepto...

The unique taste induced by monosodium glutamate is referred to as umami taste. The umami taste is also elicited by the purine nucleotides inosine 5'-monophosphate and guanosine 5'-monophosphate. There is evidence that a heterodimeric G protein-coupled receptor, which consists of the T1R1 (taste receptor type 1, member 1, Tas1r1) and the T1R3 (taste receptor type 1, member 3, Tas1r3) proteins, ...