Neural and Behavioral Responses to High-Calorie and Buffet-Style Food Cues

: Integrating fMRI and Eye Tracking Evidence

Abstract

The modern food environment is characterized by attractive visual cues of food that significantly affect human food-seeking behavior. Eating is a multi-sensory activity involving the sense of taste, smell, touch, and vision, with vision commonly taking a prominent position in our earliest interactions with food. The research employs a combined Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and eye-tracking technique to examine the degree of brain reward system and attentional engagement with various images of foods in a healthy population. Participants were passively viewed static images of either single foods, or buffetstyle presentations of multiple foods, which were identified as high or low-calorie foods. The experimental design provides for a consideration of neural activity profiles with respect to single vs. multiple food types, as well as high vs. lowcalorie foods. An examination of activity profiles of the reward system, together with attentional metrics from eye-tracking methods, brings a fresh perspective on the mechanisms concerning the attractive impact of food stimuli on attentional/motivation aspects. The fMRI analysis showed that there were different activation profiles corresponding to different presentation conditions of the stimulus, with different brain regions involved in the reward process, such that there is a distinction between the presentation conditions of buffet versus single item presentation. The eye-tracking procedure used in this study also showed that visual attention is allocated in a way that corresponds to brain responses to food stimuli. The current findings contribute to the research on neural and behavioral combined responses to food reward cues by healthy controls, developing a basis for future comparisons with patients suffering from eating disorders.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	English
Supervisor	Andreas Lindbaum (Supervisor) & Raimund Kleiser (Supervisor)