Taste-Odor Association Learning Alters the Dynamics of Intraoral Odor Responses in the Posterior Piriform Cortex of Awake Rats.

How an odor is perceived is to a large extent dependent on the context in which that odor is (or has been) experienced. For example, experiencing an odor in mixture with taste during consumption can instill taste qualities in the percept of that odor (e.g.

Multisensory integration of orally-sourced gustatory and olfactory inputs to the posterior piriform cortex in awake rats.

Flavour refers to the sensory experience of food, which is a combination of sensory inputs sourced from multiple modalities during consumption, including taste and odour. Previous work has demonstrated that orally-sourced taste and odour cues interact to determine perceptual judgements of flavour stimuli, although the underlying cellular- and circuit-level neural mechanisms remain unknown. We recently identified a region of the piriform olfactory cortex in rats that responds to both taste and odour stimuli.