Central Gustatory Processing in Humans

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general overview of the central representation of gustatory information in the human brain. The anatomical pathways for the two primary animal models (rodent and nonhuman primate) are provided followed by the presumed human gustatory pathway. The section on the gustatory pathway describes what is known about how taste intensity, quality and affective value are represented in the human brain. The chapter concludes with a review of flavor processing.