TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lim, Shirley Xue Li
AU  - Höchenberger, Richard
AU  - Ruda, Iryna
AU  - Fink, Gereon R.
AU  - Viswanathan, Shivakumar
AU  - Ohla, Kathrin
TI  - The capacity and organization of gustatory working memory
JO  - Scientific reports
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
SN  - 2045-2322
CY  - [London]
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
M1  - FZJ-2022-03287
SP  - 8056
PY  - 2022
AB  - Remembering a particular taste is crucial in food intake and associative learning. We investigated whether taste can be dynamically encoded, maintained, and retrieved on short time scales consistent with working memory (WM). We use novel single and multi-item taste recognition tasks to show that a single taste can be reliably recognized despite repeated oro-sensory interference suggesting active and resilient maintenance (Experiment 1, N = 21). When multiple tastes were presented (Experiment 2, N = 20), the resolution with which these were maintained depended on their serial position, and recognition was reliable for up to three tastes suggesting a limited capacity of gustatory WM. Lastly, stimulus similarity impaired recognition with increasing set size, which seemed to mask the awareness of capacity limitations. Together, the results advocate a hybrid model of gustatory WM with a limited number of slots where items are stored with varying precision.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - 35577835
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000796701700073
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-12005-x
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/909615
ER  -