Taste novelty and dopamine

Abstract Different tastes elicit integrative functions of the central nervous system that provide a complex sensation generally associated with gustation. Eating a new food is the result of interplay of concurrent factors orchestrated by physiological and environmental elements. Taste novelty is able to regulate learning and to promote the environmental adaptation of different animal species and human beings. A corollary of events spins around taste novelty such as reactivity, neophobia, habituation, and predictivity. Intriguingly, dopamine (DA) transmission regulates many aspects of these events. Several methodological approaches show that salient stimuli affect DA transmission in different terminal areas (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens) concurrently to behavioral adaptations related to general arousal, approach, or avoidance of a taste stimulus. The involvement of DAergic terminal areas in the detection of taste novelty is confirmed by the activation of specific molecular markers. Notably, the DA response to taste novelty is connected with some aspects of psychiatric disorders.