Arianna Maffei
Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior,
Director, PhD Program in Neuroscience,
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Title
Neural Mechanisms for Taste Learning
Abstract
Taste experience early in life appear to influence food choices in adulthood. However, how taste preferences are established early in life and the circuit mechanisms that regulate them in adulthood have not been investigated. The gustatory cortex is involved in the detection and encoding of both sensory and emotional (hedonic) aspects of taste. Thus, it is an ideal model circuit to investigate the mechanisms regulating taste preference and determine how preference influences eating behaviors. As taste guides feeding behaviors in all mammalian species, many of the mechanisms regulating the gustatory system are shared across species.
I will present experimental evidence for the distinct circuit mechanisms regulating taste preferences early in life and in adulthood and discuss the circuit underpinning for the association of the identity of a taste with its hedonic value. I will also show how plasticity can modify the hedonic value of a taste by changing it from pleasurable to aversive and our current evidence about the mechanisms for this plasticity. The results of this work have important implications for our understanding of taste perception and taste guided behaviors. More broadly, they also inform us about how our perception of a sensory stimuli is modulated by their affective dimensions.
Biosketch
Dr. Maffei obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology (1997) and her PhD in Biophysics (2002) from the University of Pavia in Italy. During her graduate work she investigated the synaptic properties and plasticity of the mossy fiber input to cerebellar granule cells. In 2002 she joined Dr. Gina Turrigiano’s group at Brandeis University for her postdoctoral training. In the Turrigiano lab, she investigated plasticity mechanisms induced by visual deprivation, focusing on homeostatic plasticity and on plasticity at GABAergic synapses. In 2008, Dr Maffei joined the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and to Full Professor in 2020. She continued to investigate circuit mechanisms for plasticity in visual cortex and more recently shifted the interest of her lab to the analysis of circuits for taste processing, taste learning and their contribution to taste preferences.