ArticleNature communications2025
Tastes and retronasal odours evoke a shared flavour-specific neural code in the human insula.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Molecular Atlas of Key Food Odorants Reveals Mixture-Level Organization and Enables Generative Aroma Design.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Genetic Variants Influencing Taste Perception and Food Preferences: Current Evidence.Nutrients · 2026Review
- Olfactory-gustatory cross-modal integration: mechanisms of aroma-induced sweetness enhancement, sensory evaluation methodologies, neuroimaging evidence and advances in influencing factors.Journal of advanced research · 2026Review
- A sensory-computational framework to decipher and predict binary aroma interactions: A case study of furaneol with five Co-odorants.Food chemistry: X · 2026Article
- Attentional modulation of contamination sensitivity: sharper perceptual boundaries for food compared to nonfood odor mixtures.Chemical senses · 2026Article
- Odor-induced sweetness enhancement: EEG evidence for olfactory and gustatory cross-modal interactions.Current research in food science · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
During food consumption, tastes combine with retronasal odours to form flavour, which leads to a link so robust that retronasal odours can elicit taste sensations without concurrent taste stimulation. However, the cortical integration of these parallel sensory signals remains unclear. Here, we combine a flavour-binding paradigm and functional neuroimaging to test whether retronasal odorants evoke encoding patterns in the insula similar to those of their paired tastants. Healthy participants attend a familiarisation session with congruent sweet and savoury flavours followed by two functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) sessions where they separately receive the constituent tastants and odorants. Multivariate pattern analysis reveal classification of retronasal odours within the insula, exhibiting overlapping representations with their associated tastes, particularly in the ventral anterior insula. Additionally, we observe temporal drift in insular taste representations, paralleling findings in rodent gustatory cortex. These findings underscore the robust crossmodal influences of gustatory and retronasal olfactory processing that underpin the flavour percept.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.