US researchers discover neurons that “light up” when humans see images of food

By: Trademagazin editor Date: 2022. 09. 01. 05:58

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When consumers look at specific foods, a specialized part of the visual cortex lights up, according to a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) neuroscientists. This newly discovered population of food-responsive neurons is located in the ventral visual stream, alongside populations that respond specifically to faces, bodies, places and words.

According to the researchers, these findings may reflect the special significance of food in human culture

MIT postdoc Meenakshi Khosla is the paper’s lead author, and MIT research scientist N. Apurva Ratan Murty. The study appears in the journal Current Biology.

In one experiment, they fed the model-matched images of food and non-food items that looked very similar – for example, a banana and a yellow crescent moon.

“Those matched stimuli have very similar visual properties, but the main attribute in which they differ is edible versus inedible,” Khosla continues. “We could feed those arbitrary stimuli through the predictive model and see whether it would still respond more to food than non-food, without collecting the fMRI data.”

They could also use the computational model to analyze much larger datasets consisting of millions of images. Those simulations helped confirm that the VFC is highly selective for food images.

From their analysis of the human fMRI data, the researchers found that in some subjects, the VFC responded slightly more to processed foods such as pizza than unprocessed foods like apples. In the future, they hope to explore how factors such as familiarity and like or dislike of a particular food might affect individuals’ responses to that food.

Elizabeth Green / Food Ingredients First