Long-Term Visuo-Gustatory Appetitive and Aversive Conditioning Potentiate Human Visual Evoked Potentials.

Human recognition of foods and beverages are often based on visual cues associated with flavors. The dynamics of neurophysiological plasticity related to acquisition of such long-term associations has only recently become the target of investigation. In the present work, the effects of appetitive and aversive visuo-gustatory conditioning were studied with high density EEG-recordings focusing on late components in the visual evoked potentials (VEPs), specifically the N2-P3 waves.

Appetitive long-term taste conditioning enhances human visually evoked EEG responses.

Long-term effects of learned associations between an image and a taste have not been studied with electromagnetic brain scanning techniques. The possibility that taste conditioning may change sensory image processing was investigated in young adult subjects. EEG-responses evoked by images were recorded before and after a training session using an image as conditioned stimulus and a pleasant taste as unconditioned stimulus.

C-type period-doubling transition in nephron autoregulation.

The functional units of the kidney, called nephrons, utilize mechanisms that allow the individual nephron to regulate the incoming blood flow in response to fluctuations in the arterial pressure. This regulation tends to be unstable and to generate self-sustained oscillations, period-doubling bifurcations, mode-locking and other nonlinear dynamic phenomena in the tubular pressures and flows. Using a simplified nephron model, the paper examines how the regulatory mechanisms react to an external periodic variation in arterial pressure near a region of resonance with one of the internally generated mode-locked cycles.

Coupling-induced complexity in nephron models of renal blood flow regulation.

Tubular pressure and nephron blood flow time series display two interacting oscillations in rats with normal blood pressure. Tubuloglomerular feedback (TGF) senses NaCl concentration in tubular fluid at the macula densa, adjusts vascular resistance of the nephron's afferent arteriole, and generates the slower, larger-amplitude oscillations (0.02-0.