EEG discrimination of perceptually similar tastes.

Perceptually similar stimuli, despite not being consciously distinguishable, may result in distinct cortical brain activations. Hypothesizing that perceptually similar tastes are discriminable by electroencephalography (EEG), we recorded 22 human participants' response to equally intense sweet-tasting stimuli: caloric sucrose, low-caloric aspartame, and a low-caloric mixture of aspartame and acesulfame K. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis of the 128-channel EEG was used to discriminate the taste responses at single-trial level.