US researchers discover neurons that “light up” when humans see images of food
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
Related news
A new set of employee values is taking shape – or what does a “good workplace” mean today?
Randstad’s Workmonitor 2025 provides a comprehensive picture of how employees’…
Read more >EY: Brand loyalty is on the decline – almost only the price-value ratio matters
Consumers around the world are concerned about the rising cost…
Read more >The dark side of AI – who will stop the spread of deepfake?
Deepfakes, or fake images, videos, and audio generated by artificial…
Read more >Related news
Márton Nagy: the government would introduce margin restrictions for stores selling household goods
The government may discuss on Wednesday and is expected to…
Read more >The Hungarian Food Bank Association is organizing a record-sized food collection on Friday and Saturday
At the Friday and Saturday fundraiser organized by the Hungarian…
Read more >Pick Szeged Zrt.’s profit decreased, but its sales revenue increased last year
Pick Szeged Zrt.’s after-tax profit in 2024 was 6.7 billion…
Read more >