TOPOGRAPHICAL DIFFERENCES IN SWEETNESS SENSITIVITY IN THE PERIPHERAL GUSTATORY SYSTEM OF ADULTS AND CHILDREN

The sensitivity of localised areas of the anterior tongue of adults an d 8-year-old males to the sweetener sucrose was determined, using a tw o-alternative forced choice psychophysical procedure. Stimulation of 1 2 areas by 0.2125 M sucrose or water, using a filter paper technique, indicated that the children were significantly more sensitive to the s weetener at eight of the areas. Counts of papillae at each of the 12 a reas showed that there were similar numbers for adults and children at eight areas, whilst at three of the areas that exhibited a higher sen sitivity to sucrose, children had significantly more papillae. Since 8 -year-old males are less sensitive to sucrose when the stimulus is giv en as a whole-mouth stimulus [12], it is proposed that the children's gustatory system may be unable to integrate the information available at the tongue as efficiently as adults, or that the threshold and stim ulus-response functions of receptor cells are different in the two gro ups.