October 11, 2018 Preprint Open Access

Andersen, Camilla Arndal; Alfine, Lorenzo; Ohla, Kathrin; Höchenberger, Richard

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{
  "publisher": "Zenodo", 
  "DOI": "10.5281/zenodo.1456663", 
  "language": "eng", 
  "title": "A new gustometer: Template for the construction of a portable and modular stimulator for taste and lingual touch.", 
  "issued": {
    "date-parts": [
      [
        2018, 
        10, 
        11
      ]
    ]
  }, 
  "abstract": "<p>Taste research has been hampered by technical difficulties, mostly because liquid taste stimuli are difficult to control in terms of timing and application area. Exact stimulus control requires a gustometer; yet, existing devices are either not well-documented or rather inflexible. We designed a gustometer based on a computer-controlled, modular pump system, which can be extended through additional hardware modules, e.g. for heating of the stimuli or sending and receiving triggers. All components are available for purchase &ldquo;off-the-shelf&rdquo;. The pumps deliver liquids through plastic tubing and can be connected to commercially available or custom-made mouthpieces. We determined the temporal precision of the device. Onset delay showed minuscule variation within pumps (SD &lt; 3 ms) and small differences between pumps (&lt; 4.5 ms). Rise time was less than 2 ms (SD &lt; 2 ms). Dosage volume bias was only 2%. To test whether the hemitongues could be stimulated independently, we conducted a behavioral experiment. 18 participants received tasteless stimuli to the left, right, or both sides of the tongue. The side of stimulation was correctly identified in 91% of the trials, indicating that the setup is suitable for lateralized stimulation. EEG responses to water and salty stimuli were recorded from two participants; the stimulation successfully evoked event-related responses, demonstrating the suitability of the device for use in electrophysiological investigations. We provide a Python-based open-source software package and a web interface to easily operate the system. We thereby hope to facilitate access to state-of-the-art taste research methods and to increase reproducibility across laboratories.</p>", 
  "author": [
    {
      "family": "Andersen, Camilla Arndal"
    }, 
    {
      "family": "Alfine, Lorenzo"
    }, 
    {
      "family": "Ohla, Kathrin"
    }, 
    {
      "family": "H\u00f6chenberger, Richard"
    }
  ], 
  "type": "article", 
  "id": "1456663"
}