The multisensory nature of the flavour percept, which unites olfaction, gustation and somatosensation in one experience, creates an object representation of a specific food item. These object representations are crucial in guiding our eating behaviour, ensuring adequate intake of nutrients and avoidance of potential poisoning. Recent work has further highlighted that flavour percepts are modulated by both postprandial metabolic processing and associative learning, but to date, the cognitive and cortical processes underlying this integration of signals from different sources remain to be fully understood. This talk will summarize research findings emerging from the study of olfactory-gustatory concordance processing in different experimental contexts. By presenting participants with stimulus mixtures that gradually add a contaminant to a familiar mixture, we show that the impact of flavour familiarity follows a probabilistic gradient, and that this gradient can be influenced by internal states and prior knowledge. We will also provide an overview of the cortical networks that are involved in taste-associated odour processing and discuss possible functional mechanisms for odour-taste associative learning. Our findings will be discussed with respect to the evolutionary advantages of the behavioural flexibility: a weighted processing of sensory input helps to balance tolerance for natural variation in previously unknown flavour combinations (exploration) against optimising nutrient intake and contamination avoidance by maximising intake of previously known flavours (exploitation). The talk will end with an outlook on future research paths that might incorporate effects of cognitive states on the concordance gradient, and the incorporation of sensory inputs beyond the chemical senses, such as texture and temperature, as dimensions along which concordance can be modulated.

Funding: ERC StG 947886 – OLFLINK