ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Viewing images of foods evokes taste quality-specific activity in gustatory insular cortex.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- Multisession transcranial direct current stimulation and aerobic exercise synergistically improve food craving symptoms, impulsivity, and cognitive flexibility in women with overweight and obesity: a randomized controlled trial.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Trial
- Representational structure of perceived food attributes in human occipitotemporal cortex.iScience · 2026Article
- Brain functional connectivity patterns associated with adiposity in schizophrenia.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2026Article
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Nonlinear and intensity-dependent enhancement of sweetness perception as a function of redness: Behavioral and EEG evidence for visual-gustatory cross-modal integration.Food chemistry: X · 2026Article
- Music-taste interactions enhance gustatory and sensorimotor brain activity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Large-scale brain network interactions differentiate sweet, sour, and salty food cues during visual processing.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Same emotion, different stimuli: A context-sensitive method to evoke nostalgia.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Neuronal detection triggers systemic digestive shutdown in response to adverse food sources ineLife · 2025Article
- Brain Microstructure and Obesity Risk in Early Childhood: Insights from Restriction Spectrum Imaging.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Fibroblast Growth Factor 21 Levels Are Associated With Perception and Neural Responses to Sweetness in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.Diabetes & metabolism journal · 2025Article
- Perceived food value depends on display format, preference strength, and physical accessibility.Appetite · 2025Article
- Automatic engagement of limbic and prefrontal networks in response to food images reflects distinct information about food hedonics and inhibitory control.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Isle of Craig: Neuroanatomical and Functional Evidence for a Role of the Insular Cortex in Subjective Feelings.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Article
- A low-calorie rebaudioside D-glucose-sodium sweetener matches sucrose in palatability and neural responses in a functional MRI study of healthy adults.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Positive serial dependence in ratings of food images for appeal and calories.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- UPReLife · 2024Article
- Graspable foods and tools elicit similar responses in visual cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The Time-Course of Food Representation in the Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that the conceptual representation of food involves brain regions associated with taste perception. The specificity of this response, however, is unknown. Does viewing pictures of food produce a general, nonspecific response in taste-sensitive regions of the brain? Or is the response specific for how a particular food tastes? Building on recent findings that specific tastes can be decoded from taste-sensitive regions of insular cortex, we asked whether viewing pictures of foods associated with a specific taste (e.g., sweet, salty, and sour) can also be decoded from these same regions, and if so, are the patterns of neural activity elicited by the pictures and their associated tastes similar? Using ultrahigh-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging at high magnetic field strength (7-Tesla), we were able to decode specific tastes delivered during scanning, as well as the specific taste category associated with food pictures within the dorsal mid-insula, a primary taste responsive region of brain. Thus, merely viewing food pictures triggers an automatic retrieval of specific taste quality information associated with the depicted foods, within gustatory cortex. However, the patterns of activity elicited by pictures and their associated tastes were unrelated, thus suggesting a clear neural distinction between inferred and directly experienced sensory events. These data show how higher-order inferences derived from stimuli in one modality (i.e., vision) can be represented in brain regions typically thought to represent only low-level information about a different modality (i.e., taste).
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.