Taste guides food selection.
Conversely, food selection affects taste. The taste system responds more vigorously to glucose when the animal is hungry than when satiated. On the other hand, if sugar is associated with nausea, taste responses change to remove the normal reward that sugar would have. One of our goals is to understand the scope of this reciprocal interaction between feeding and taste, and the mechanisms underlying it. In both rats and monkeys, we know which neurons are involved.