Chemical Senses Advance Access published online on October 5, 2006
Chemical Senses, doi:10.1093/chemse/bjl033
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1 The John B. Pierce Laboratory, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519, USA; Department of Surgery (Otolaryngology), School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Although it has long been studied as a pure sensory irritant, the ability of capsaicin to evoke, mask, and desensitize bitter taste suggests that burning sensations and bitter taste might be closely related perceptually. The current study investigated the psychophysical relationship between bitterness and burning using 2 different approaches. In Experiment 1, spatial discrimination of 4 taste stimuli was measured in the presence or absence of capsaicin. The subjects' task was to report which of 3 swabs, spaced 1 cm apart and presented to the tongue tip, contained a taste stimulus when 1) water was presented on the other 2 swabs or 2) when 10 µM capsaicin was presented on all 3 swabs. The presence of capsaicin did not change performance on the 3 alternative forced-choice (3-AFC) task for sweet, sour, and salty stimuli, while the localization error for 1.8 mM quinine sulfate (QSO4) increased significantly. In Experiment 2, the perceptual similarity/dissimilarity of taste stimuli and capsaicin was measured directly using pairs of stimuli applied to opposite sides of the tongue tip on swabs separated by 2 cm. Multidimensional scaling analyses showed that capsaicin fell nearer to QSO4 than to any other taste stimulus. Cluster analysis corroborated this finding: capsaicin was closely linked with QSO4 and the capsaicin-QSO4 group was separated from the other taste stimuli. The latter result indicated that bitterness was more similar to burning than to the other tastes. These findings imply that despite being mediated by different sensory modalities, bitterness and burn are qualitatively similar. We speculate that this similarity reflects a common function of these 2 sensations as sensory signals of potentially harmful stimuli.
Accepted September 11, 2006
Article
The Psychophysical Relationship between Bitter Taste and Burning Sensation: Evidence of Qualitative Similarity
Juyun Lim 1 * and Barry G. Green 1
Juyun Lim, E-mail: jlim{at}jbpierce.org
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