Taste is a major determinant of children's food preferences, but its development is incompletely known. Thus, exploring infants' acceptance of basic tastes is necessary. The first objective was to evaluate the acceptance of tastes and their developmental changes over the first year. The second objective was to compare acceptance across tastes. The third objective was to evaluate global taste re...

How does the brain cause positive affective reactions to sensory pleasure? An answer to pleasure causation requires knowing not only which brain systems are activated by pleasant stimuli, but also which systems actually cause their positive affective properties. This paper focuses on brain causation of behavioral positive affective reactions to pleasant sensations, such as sweet tastes. Its goa...

Food preferences have been identified as a key determinant of children's food acceptance and consumption. The aim of this study was to identify factors that influence children's liking for fruits, vegetables and non-core foods. Participants were Australian mothers (median age at delivery=31years, 18-46years) and their two-year-old children (M=24months, SD=1month; 52% female) allocated to the co...

Improving the nutritional profile of sausages through the addition of dietary fiber might affect appetite, sensory characteristics, and liking differently depending on the fiber source. This study investigates the sensory characteristics and consumer acceptance of sausages with 10% (w/w) fat and added rye or wheat bran. Sensory descriptive attributes (odor, appearance, texture, and flavor) of r...

Identification of energy sources depends upon the ability to form associations between food cues and nutritional value. As such, cues previously paired with calories elicit neuronal activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), which reflects the reinforcing value of food. The identity of the physiological signals regulating this response remains elusive. Using fMRI, we examined brain response to...

Odor stimuli play a major role in perception of food flavor. Food-related odors have also been shown to increase rated appetite, and induce salivation and release of gastric acid and insulin. However, our ability to identify an odor as food-related, and our liking for food-related odors, are both learned responses. In conditioning studies, repeated experience of odors with sweet and sour tastes...

The high failure rate of new market introductions, despite initial successful testing with traditional sensory and consumer tests, necessitates the development of other tests. This study explored the ability of selected physiological and behavioral measures of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to distinguish between repeated exposures to foods from a single category (breakfast drinks) and with...

Microblogging services, such as Twitter, offer a variety of interactive features that allow users to engage with contacts in their social network and the content they produce. One such feature is the favourite button on Twitter, an icon in the form of a star that users can click on to assign a special status to a particular tweet. Despite evidence suggesting that users increasingly make use of ...