ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2021
The orbitofrontal cortex spontaneously encodes food health and contains more distinct representations for foods highest in tastiness.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Food Consciousness Intervention Improves Interoceptive Sensitivity and Expression of Exteroception in Women.Nutrients · 2022Trial
- Attentional biases in self-control are associated with reward cue-related brain activity.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Effects of Interoceptive and Exteroceptive Attention Training on Desire-Driven Eating in Healthy Adults: A Quasi-Experimental Early-Stage Feasibility Study.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- From attributes to value: Neural correlates of a front-of-package label on food decision-making - An fMRI study.PloS one · 2025Article
- Hunger, Satiety, and Their Vulnerabilities.Nutrients · 2024Review
- Alterations in resting-state functional activity and connectivity for major depressive disorder appetite and weight disturbance phenotypes.Psychological medicine · 2023Article
- Nutrition claims influence expectations about food attributes, attenuate activity in reward-associated brain regions during tasting, but do not impact pleasantness.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- Hunger modulates perceptions of food health but not taste in restricted eaters.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Neural Representations of Food-Related Attributes in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex during Choice Deliberation in Anorexia Nervosa.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Brain Responses to High-Calorie Visual Food Cues in Individuals with Normal-Weight or Obesity: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Computational methods in social neuroscience: recent advances, new tools and future directions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been associated with food reward processing and is thought to represent modality-independent signals of value. Food tastiness and health are core attributes of many models of food choice and dietary self-control. Here we used functional neuroimaging to examine the neural representation of tastiness and health for a set of 28 food categories selected to be orthogonal with respect to both dimensions. Using representational similarity analysis, in conjunction with linear mixed-effects modeling, we demonstrate that the OFC spontaneously encodes food health, whereas tastiness was associated with greater neural dissimilarity. Subsequent analyses using model dissimilarity matrices that encode overall tastiness magnitude demonstrated that the neural representation of foods grows more distinct with increasing tastiness but not with increasing health. In a separate study, we use lexical analysis of natural language descriptions of food to show that food tastiness is associated with more elaborate descriptions of food. Together these data show not only that the OFC spontaneously encodes the dimensions of health and tastiness when viewing appetitive food cues, but also that the neural and cognitive representations of food categories that are the highest in tastiness are more refined than those lower in tastiness.
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