How Are Food Preferences Formed and Changed? Sensory Contributions to Anticipatory and Consummatory Processing of Food Reward

Imagine a lunch buffet with different appetizers, followed by a selection of main courses, and a range of puddings for dessert. You cannot try everything, so you pick the foods that look best: some tart-looking cucumber salad to start and a creamy ragout for the main course, making sure to leave room for dessert. When you finally dig in, you instantly realize your mistake: the ragout is oversalted, the cucumbers are slimy, and you wish you had gone for the tomato salad and lasagna instead. The food that you thought you liked turned out not to be pleasant at all. This situation illustrates the fundamental information gap between the sensory information from the outside world that shapes our motivation to choose one food over another (anticipatory food perception) and the sensory experiences within the mouth that determine the pleasure we feel while eating (consummatory food perception). Our brain typically fills this sensory gap seamlessly, forming accurate predictions about the flavours about to come. Only on the rare occasions where this process fails do we become aware of the imperfect predictive link between the sensory cues involved in anticipation and consumption. This chapter gives an overview of the separate sensory integration processes underlying anticipatory and consummatory food processing, how the relationship between these channels is learned and how it is represented in the brain.