T HERE are a number of factors, both of an environmental and an intraorganic nature, which can influence the taste responses of various species of animals, some serving to increase and others acting to decrease stimulant concentrations at behavioral taste thresholds. Among these variables are included the nature of the taste medium (Mackey and Valassi, 1956; Mackey, 1958) ; the temperature of t...

Adaptive methods provide quick and reliable estimates of sensory sensitivity. Yet, these procedures are typically developed for and applied to the non-chemical senses only, i.e., to vision, audition, and somatosensation. The relatively long inter-stimulus-intervals in gustatory studies, which are required to minimize adaptation and habituation, call for time-efficient threshold estimations. We ...

BACKGROUND Smoking is the cause of inducing changes in taste functionality under conditions of chronic exposure. The objective of this study was to evaluate taste sensitivity in young smokers and non-smokers and identify any differences in the shape, density and vascularisation of the fungiform papillae (fPap) of their tongue. METHODS Sixty-two male subjects who served in the Greek military f...

Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that females' preferences for sweet foods are affected by hormonal fluctuations across the reproductive cycle. In rats, the preference for sweet foods may involve estrogen-mediated changes in response to the taste of sweets. Our recent work showed that ovariectomized female rats lick less to dilute sucrose solutions when given estrogen than when given t...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to compare taste detection and recognition thresholds of young males and females, and young phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) "tasters" and "nontasters" for stimuli representing sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami classes of taste sensations. STUDY DESIGN Thirty-eight men and 37 women (mean [SD] age = 24.5 [2.5] years) were classified as PTC tasters and nontaster...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS The purpose of this study was to validate the use of edible taste strips for measuring taste recognition thresholds for the bitter-tasting compound 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). STUDY DESIGN Taste recognition thresholds for PROP were obtained by two separate methods. Thresholds were also identified in subjects whose airflow through the nose was blocked. Threshold values w...

Modern psychophysics has traveled considerably beyond the threshold measures that dominated sensory studies in the first half of this century. Current methods capture the range of perceived intensity from threshold to maximum and promise to provide increasingly accurate comparisons of perceived intensities across individuals. The application of new psychophysical tools to genetic variation in t...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship of taster status with taste detection and recognition thresholds for sucrose and quinine. DESIGN Sixty-nine subjects (35 men and 34 women; mean age, 23.9+/-1.2 years) were included. Stimulus fluids were prepared, one each for phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), sucrose and quinine HCl. In each series, succ...

To develop a technique suitable for measuring NaCl taste thresholds in genetic studies, we conducted a series of experiments with outbred CD-1 mice using conditioned taste aversion (CTA) and two-bottle preference tests. In Experiment 1, we compared conditioning procedures involving either oral self-administration of LiCl or pairing NaCl intake with LiCl injections and found that thresholds were...