Projects
Taste perception and neural processing
The gustatory system is a gateway to nutrient sensing, yet it is the least understood of our senses. We ask how taste information flows from tongue to cortex, how taste is represented and encoded within the human brain, and how neural taste processing links to and determines behavior.
Multisensory perception
Food perception is multisensory: the visual appearance (e.g., color), smell, taste, sound (e.g., crunchiness), texture (e.g., creaminess), and temperature of a food influence its perception and, eventually, all attributes together determine whether or not this food will be accepted. What are the underlying brain mechanisms?
Taste memory
Have you ever wondered whether we can memorize taste? We have – that’s why we started a new project to investigate the properties of taste memory. We ask: Can we store taste information? What is the capacity of this store? What are the rules for optimal retrieval?
Determinants of food choice
Within the Competence Cluster Nutrition Research NutriAct, we investigate the determinants of food choice in the NutriAct Family Study. We ask how taste/smell perception relates to attitudes, food intake, and familial situation across the lifespan? We combine cross-disciplinary expertise from psychology, epidemiology, sociology, and nutrition science as well as qualitative and quantitative methods.
Influencing taste: Contextual effects on food and taste perception
We constantly sample our environment for cues, which let us predict future events. What are the neural mechanisms by which expectations shape taste perception? What are the behavioral consequences of our neural states representing food in contexts? What is the role of prior experience and knowledge? The results bear the potential to lead to immediate application in food marketing and nutritional interventions (framing) and are hence part of NutriAct.
Changes in chemosensory perception
We examine vulnerable populations to assess their ability to taste and smell and the effects of changed chemosensory perception on food choice and psychological factors such as quality of life. Here, we also test to potential of taste and smell training to slow down or compensate loss.
Nutritional neuroenhancement
Food is fuel for our brains. How does nutrition affect cognitive performance? We compared the efficacy of different types of enhancement (nutritional, mental, pharmacological) in an interdisciplinary project, which emerged from the European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung.
Methods development and evaluation
To address our research questions and to boost the rigor in chemosensory and food research, we continuously develop methods and experimental protocols and we test the reliability, validity, and practicality of these procedures.
Check out some of my Research Papers