Changes in brain and behavior during food-based decision-making following treatment of anorexia nervosa

Background Anorexia nervosa is a severe illness with a high mortality rate, driven in large part by severe and persistent restriction of food intake. A critical challenge is to identify brain mechanisms associated with maladaptive eating behavior and whether they change with treatment. This study tested whether food choice-related caudate activation in anorexia nervosa changes with treatment. Methods Healthy women (n = 29) and women hospitalized with anorexia nervosa (n = 24), ages 18 to 40 years, completed a Food Choice Task during fMRI scanning at two timepoints. Among patients, procedures occurred upon hospital admission (Time 1) and again after patients had gained to normal weight (Time 2). Healthy controls were tested twice at an interval group-matched to patients. Choice-related caudate activation was assessed at each timepoint, using parametric analyses in an a priori region of interest. Results Among patients, the proportion of high-fat foods selected did not change over time (p’s > 0.47), but decreased neural activity in the caudate after treatment was associated with increased selection of high-fat foods (r23 = − 0.43, p = 0.037). Choice-related caudate activation differed among women with anorexia nervosa vs healthy control women at Time 1 (healthy control: M = 0.15 ± 0.87, anorexia nervosa: M = 0.70 ± 1.1, t51 = − 2.05, p = 0.045), but not at Time 2 (healthy control: M = 0.18 ± 1.0, anorexia nervosa: M = 0.37 ± 0.99, t51 = − 0.694, p = 0.49). Conclusions Caudate activity was more strongly associated with decisions about food among individuals with anorexia nervosa relative to healthy comparison individuals prior to treatment, and decreases in caudate engagement among individuals with anorexia nervosa undergoing treatment were associated with increases in high-fat food choices. The findings underscore the need for treatment development that more successfully alters both eating behavior and the neural mechanisms that guide it

Food Folio by the Columbia Center for Eating Disorders

Food image stimulus set for the study of eating behavior and cognitio

Category learning and the memory systems debate

A substantial and growing body of evidence from cognitive neuroscience supports the concept of multiple memory systems (MMS). However, the existence of multiple systems has been questioned by theorists who instead propose that dissociations can be accounted for within a single memory system. We present convergent evidence from neuroimaging and neuro psycho logical studies of category learning in favor of the existence of MMS for category learning and declarative knowledge. Whereas single-system theorists have argued that their approach is more parsimonious because it only postulates a single form of memory representation, we show that the MMS approach is superior in its ability to account for a broad range of data from psychology and neuroscience. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

An Upside to Reward Sensitivity: The Hippocampus Supports Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in Adolescence.

Adolescents are notorious for engaging in reward-seeking behaviors, a tendency attributed to heightened activity in the brain's reward systems during adolescence. It has been suggested that reward sensitivity in adolescence might be adaptive, but evidence of an adaptive role has been scarce. Using a probabilistic reinforcement learning task combined with reinforcement learning models and fMRI, we found that adolescents showed better reinforcement learning and a stronger link between reinforcement learning and episodic memory for rewarding outcomes. This behavioral benefit was related to heightened prediction error-related BOLD activity in the hippocampus and to stronger functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the striatum at the time of reinforcement. These findings reveal an important role for the hippocampus in reinforcement learning in adolescence and suggest that reward sensitivity in adolescence is related to adaptive differences in how adolescents learn from experience

An Upside to Reward Sensitivity: The Hippocampus Supports Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in Adolescence.

Adolescents are notorious for engaging in reward-seeking behaviors, a tendency attributed to heightened activity in the brain's reward systems during adolescence. It has been suggested that reward sensitivity in adolescence might be adaptive, but evidence of an adaptive role has been scarce. Using a probabilistic reinforcement learning task combined with reinforcement learning models and fMRI, we found that adolescents showed better reinforcement learning and a stronger link between reinforcement learning and episodic memory for rewarding outcomes. This behavioral benefit was related to heightened prediction error-related BOLD activity in the hippocampus and to stronger functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the striatum at the time of reinforcement. These findings reveal an important role for the hippocampus in reinforcement learning in adolescence and suggest that reward sensitivity in adolescence is related to adaptive differences in how adolescents learn from experience

Influence of attended repetition trials on negative priming in younger and older adults

A lengthened response time when a distractor becomes a target, called negative priming, is an undisputed phenomenon in selective attention, yet just what the underlying mechanism responsible for negative priming is has not been resolved. In this study, the proportion of attended repetition trials was manipulated in order to test the predictions of three theories that have been proposed for explaining spatial negative priming: distractor suppression (e.g., Tipper, 1985), episodic memory retrieval (e.g., Neill, Valdes, & Terry, 1995), and novelty bias (e.g., Milliken, Tipper, Houghton, & Lupiáñez, 2000). The results supported the proposal that a novelty bias, which is flexible and can be overridden, is the primary mechanism responsible for priming in spatial tasks. Memory retrieval obscured the novelty bias for target processing, was more selective in older adults, and did not affect distractor processing. Novelty bias and distractor suppression may share the same inhibitory attentional mechanism

Food Folio by the Columbia Center for Eating Disorders

The Food Folio created by the Columbia Center for Eating Disorders is a stimulus set containing 138 high resolution color photographs of food-items. Each item was photographed situated on the center of a white plate, surrounded by a black background. Foods were prepared and photographed in-house by a professional photographer. Items for the set include a mix of: processed (e.g., pizza); unprocessed (e.g., cucumber sticks); sweet (e.g., brownie); savory (e.g., chicken fingers); single item (e.g., boiled eggs); item combinations (e.g., cereal with milk); snack foods (e.g., yoghurt pretzels); and meals (e.g., rigatoni and sauce). This set of food items was generated with the original purpose of research in eating disorders. The stimulus set is also useful for probing eating behavior and cognition in healthy populations. Of the 138 foods, 76 items are considered low-fat (defined as deriving < 30% of total calories from fat), and 62 are high-fat. Nutrient content (calories and macronutrients) and physical image properties are presented alongside the images. Data collected from a large and normative United States population sample (n=1054) accompany the stimulus set: 1) Ratings of 17 different attributes are presented: protein content; fat content; carbohydrate content; vitamin content; sodium content; sugar content; gluten content; caloric content; healthiness; tastiness; how tasty others think the food is; fillingness; savoriness; pleasantness of texture; disgusting; feelings of happiness or sadness evoked from the food; and familiarity. 2) Choice data include the number of times each food-item was selected in a binary choice task, indexing preference or value