Pictures of Appetizing Foods Activate Gustatory Cortices for Taste and Reward

TLDR

Concepts are represented as distributed circuits of property information across modality‑specific brain areas. The study investigates how foods are represented as distributed concepts in the brain. Participants viewed food and location pictures during fMRI, and pattern completion of food images activated gustatory regions to generate taste inferences. Food images activated gustatory regions (insula, orbitofrontal cortex) and visual shape areas, forming a distributed circuit that mirrors activation during actual tasting and supports taste inferences.

Abstract

Increasing research indicates that concepts are represented as distributed circuits of property information across the brain's modality-specific areas. The current study examines the distributed representation of an important but under-explored category, foods. Participants viewed pictures of appetizing foods (along with pictures of locations for comparison) during event-related fMRI. Compared to location pictures, food pictures activated the right insula/operculum and the left orbitofrontal cortex, both gustatory processing areas. Food pictures also activated regions of visual cortex that represent object shape. Together these areas contribute to a distributed neural circuit that represents food knowledge. Not only does this circuit become active during the tasting of actual foods, it also becomes active while viewing food pictures. Via the process of pattern completion, food pictures activate gustatory regions of the circuit to produce conceptual inferences about taste. Consistent with theories that ground knowledge in the modalities, these inferences arise as reenactments of modality-specific processing.