Multivariate representation of food preferences in the human brain
Abstract
One major goal in decision neuroscience is to investigate the neuronal mechanisms being responsible for the computation of product preferences. The aim of the present fMRI study was to investigate whether similar patterns of brain activity, reflecting category dependent and category independent preference signals, can be observed in case of different food product categories (i.e. chocolate bars and salty snacks). To that end we used a multivariate searchlight approach in which a linear support vector machine (l-SVM) was trained to distinguish preferred from non-preferred chocolate bars and subsequently tested its predictive power in case of chocolate bars (within category prediction) and salty snacks (across category prediction). Preferences were measured by a binary forced choice decision paradigm before the fMRI task. In the scanner, subjects saw only one product per trial which they had to rate after presentation. Consistent with previous multi voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) studies, we found category dependent preference signals in the ventral parts of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but also in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Category independent preference signals were o...Continue Reading
References
Category-dependent and category-independent goal-value codes in human ventromedial prefrontal cortex
A functional hierarchy within the parietofrontal network in stimulus selection and attention control
Citations
Related Concepts
Related Feeds
Basal Forebrain & Food Avoidance
Neurons in the basal forebrain play specific roles in regulating feeding. Here are the latest discoveries pertaining to the basal forebrain and food avoidance.