What Can the Brain Teach Us about Winemaking? An fMRI Study of Alcohol Level Preferences


Autoria(s): Frost, Ram; Quiñones, Ileana; Veldhuizen, Maria; Alava, José Iñaki; Small, Dana; Carreiras Valiña, Manuel Francisco
Data(s)

03/05/2016

03/05/2016

18/03/2015

Resumo

Over the last few decades, wine makers have been producing wines with a higher alcohol content, assuming that they are more appreciated by consumers. To test this hypothesis, we used functional magnetic imaging to compare reactions of human subjects to different types of wine, focusing on brain regions critical for flavor processing and food reward. Participants were presented with carefully matched pairs of high- and low- alcohol content red wines, without informing them of any of the wine attributes. Contrary to expectation, significantly greater activation was found for low- alcohol than for high- alcohol content wines in brain regions that are sensitive to taste intensity, including the insula as well as the cerebellum. Wines were closely matched for all physical attributes except for alcohol content, thus we interpret the preferential response to the low- alcohol content wines as arising from top-down modulation due to the low alcohol content wines inducing greater attentional exploration of aromas and flavours. The findings raise intriguing possibilities for objectively testing hypotheses regarding methods of producing a highly complex product such as wine.

Identificador

Plos One 10(3) 2015 : (2015) // Article ID e0119220

1932-6203

http://hdl.handle.net/10810/18146

10.1371/journal.pone.0119220

Idioma(s)

eng

Publicador

Public Library Science

Relação

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119220#abstract0

Direitos

© 2015 Frost et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Palavras-Chave #neural representations #activation #acquisition #intensity #attention #cortex #taste
Tipo

info:eu-repo/semantics/article