Although the act of eating is voluntary, its initiation depends on several factors including its taste and the animal's internal state as related to hunger or satiety. These factors, together with the food's hedonic value, will determine whether food will be ingested. The taste of food will depend on the activation of receptors located on taste cells but also on the expectation of what it will taste like. For these reasons, it is important to investigate, in behaving animals, the neural correlates of feeding behaviour in the taste–reward pathway. Here we review particular coding strategies, present experiments using freely licking rodents with chronically implanted arrays of electrodes throughout the taste–reward pathway to investigate the changes that occur when animals learn to discriminate among tastants and after they are ingested. In summary, we found that gustatory processing does not only depend on the input from the oral cavity but on expectation, learning, and post‐ingestive effects. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

中文翻译：

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味觉-奖赏途径中的化学感应处理。

虽然进食行为是自愿的，但它的开始取决于几个因素，包括它的味道和与饥饿或饱腹感相关的动物内部状态。这些因素，连同食物的享乐价值，将决定食物是否会被摄入。食物的味道将取决于位于味觉细胞上的受体的激活，但也取决于对其味道的预期。由于这些原因，重要的是在行为动物中研究味觉奖励途径中进食行为的神经相关性。在这里，我们回顾了特定的编码策略，展示了在整个味觉奖励途径中使用长期植入电极阵列的自由舔食啮齿动物的实验，以研究当动物学会区分促味剂和摄入促味剂后发生的变化。总之，我们发现味觉处理不仅取决于口腔的输入，还取决于期望、学习和摄取后的影响。版权所有 © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.