Brain responses to food viewing in women during pregnancy and post partum and their relationship with metabolic health: study protocol for the FOODY Brain Study, a prospective observational study.

Introduction: Food cravings are common in pregnancy and along with emotional eating and eating in the absence of hunger, they are associated with excessive weight gain and adverse effects on metabolic health including gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Women with GDM also show poorer mental health, which further can contribute to dysregulated eating behaviour. Food cravings can lead to greater activity in brain centres known to be involved in food 'wanting' and reward valuation as well as emotional eating.

Distinct brain representations of processed and unprocessed foods.

Among all of the stimuli surrounding us, food is arguably the most rewarding for the essential role it plays in our survival. In previous visual recognition research, it has already been demonstrated that the brain not only differentiates edible stimuli from non-edible stimuli but also is endowed with the ability to detect foods' idiosyncratic properties such as energy content. Given the contribution of the cooked diet to human evolution, in the present study we investigated whether the brain is sensitive to the level of processing food underwent, based solely on its visual appearance.

The Impact of Caloric and Non-Caloric Sweeteners on Food Intake and Brain Responses to Food: A Randomized Crossover Controlled Trial in Healthy Humans.

Whether non-nutritive sweetener (NNS) consumption impacts food intake behavior in humans is still unclear. Discrepant sensory and metabolic signals are proposed to mislead brain regulatory centers, in turn promoting maladaptive food choices favoring weight gain. We aimed to assess whether ingestion of sucrose- and NNS-sweetened drinks would differently alter brain responses to food viewing and food intake.

The impact of replacing sugar- by artificially-sweetened beverages on brain and behavioral responses to food viewing - An exploratory study.

Several studies indicate that the outcome of nutritional and lifestyle interventions can be linked to brain 'signatures' in terms of neural reactivity to food cues. However, 'dieting' is often considered in a rather broad sense, and no study so far investigated modulations in brain responses to food cues occurring over an intervention specifically aiming to reduce sugar intake. We studied neural activity and liking in response to visual food cues in 14 intensive consumers of sugar-sweetened beverages before and after a 3-month replacement period by artificially-sweetened equivalents.

Does my brain want what my eyes like? - How food liking and choice influence spatio-temporal brain dynamics of food viewing.

How food valuation and decision-making influence the perception of food is of major interest to better understand food intake behavior and, by extension, body weight management. Our study investigated behavioral responses and spatio-temporal brain dynamics by means of visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in twenty-two normal-weight participants when viewing pairs of food photographs. Participants rated how much they liked each food item (valuation) and subsequently chose between the two alternative food images.

Human gustation: when the brain has taste.

What we put into our mouths can nourish or kill us. A new study uses state-of-the-art electroencephalogram decoding to detail how we and our brains know what we taste.

Brain dynamics of meal size selection in humans.

Although neuroimaging research has evidenced specific responses to visual food stimuli based on their nutritional quality (e.g., energy density, fat content), brain processes underlying portion size selection remain largely unexplored.

Long-term effects of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass on postprandial plasma lipid and bile acids kinetics in female non diabetic subjects: A cross-sectional pilot study.

Background And Aims: Formerly obese patients having undergone Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) display both an accelerated digestion and absorption of carbohydrate and an increased plasma glucose clearance rate after meal ingestion. How RYGB effects postprandial kinetics of dietary lipids has yet not been investigated.

Methods: Plasma triglyceride (TG), apoB48, total apoB, bile acids (BA), fibroblast growth factor 19 (FGF19), and cholecystokinin (CCK) were measured in post-absorptive conditions and over 4-h following the ingestion of a mixed test meal in a cross-sectional, pilot study involving 11 formerly obese female patients 33.

Verbal labels selectively bias brain responses to high-energy foods.

The influence of external factors on food preferences and choices is poorly understood. Knowing which and how food-external cues impact the sensory processing and cognitive valuation of food would provide a strong benefit toward a more integrative understanding of food intake behavior and potential means of interfering with deviant eating patterns to avoid detrimental health consequences for individuals in the long run. We investigated whether written labels with positive and negative (as opposed to 'neutral') valence differentially modulate the spatio-temporal brain dynamics in response to the subsequent viewing of high- and low-energetic food images.

Dynamics of phonological-phonetic encoding in word production: evidence from diverging ERPs between stroke patients and controls.

While the dynamics of lexical-semantic and lexical-phonological encoding in word production have been investigated in several event-related potential (ERP) studies, the estimated time course of phonological-phonetic encoding is the result of rather indirect evidence. We investigated the dynamics of phonological-phonetic encoding combining ERP analyses covering the entire encoding process in picture naming and word reading tasks by comparing ERP modulations in eight brain-damaged speakers presenting impaired phonological-phonetic encoding relative to 16 healthy controls. ERPs diverged between groups in terms of local waveform amplitude and global topography at ∼400 ms after stimulus onset in the picture naming task and at ∼320-350 ms in word reading and sustained until 100 ms before articulation onset.

Gender and weight shape brain dynamics during food viewing.

Hemodynamic imaging results have associated both gender and body weight to variation in brain responses to food-related information. However, the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of gender-related and weight-wise modulations in food discrimination still remain to be elucidated. We analyzed visual evoked potentials (VEPs) while normal-weighted men (n = 12) and women (n = 12) categorized photographs of energy-dense foods and non-food kitchen utensils.

Visual-gustatory interaction: orbitofrontal and insular cortices mediate the effect of high-calorie visual food cues on taste pleasantness.

Vision provides a primary sensory input for food perception. It raises expectations on taste and nutritional value and drives acceptance or rejection. So far, the impact of visual food cues varying in energy content on subsequent taste integration remains unexplored.

Dynamic changes in brain functional connectivity during concurrent dual-task performance.

This study investigated the spatial, spectral, temporal and functional proprieties of functional brain connections involved in the concurrent execution of unrelated visual perception and working memory tasks. Electroencephalography data was analysed using a novel data-driven approach assessing source coherence at the whole-brain level. Three connections in the beta-band (18-24 Hz) and one in the gamma-band (30-40 Hz) were modulated by dual-task performance.

The role of energetic value in dynamic brain response adaptation during repeated food image viewing.

The repeated presentation of simple objects as well as biologically salient objects can cause the adaptation of behavioral and neural responses during the visual categorization of these objects. Mechanisms of response adaptation during repeated food viewing are of particular interest for better understanding food intake beyond energetic needs. Here, we measured visual evoked potentials (VEPs) and conducted neural source estimations to initial and repeated presentations of high-energy and low-energy foods as well as non-food images.

Food's visually perceived fat content affects discrimination speed in an orthogonal spatial task.

Choosing what to eat is a complex activity for humans. Determining a food's pleasantness requires us to combine information about what is available at a given time with knowledge of the food's palatability, texture, fat content, and other nutritional information. It has been suggested that humans may have an implicit knowledge of a food's fat content based on its appearance; Toepel et al.

Context- and prosody-driven ERP markers for dialog focus perception in children.

The development of language proficiency extends late into childhood and includes not only producing or comprehending sounds, words and sentences, but likewise larger utterances spanning beyond sentence borders like dialogs. Dialogs consist of information units whose value constantly varies within a verbal exchange. While information is focused when introduced for the first time or corrected in order to alter the knowledge state of communication partners, the same information turns into shared knowledge during the further course of a verbal exchange.

In the eye of the listener: pupil dilation elucidates discourse processing.

The current study investigated cognitive resource allocation in discourse processing by means of pupil dilation and behavioral measures. Short question-answer dialogs were presented to listeners. Either the context question queried a new information focus in the successive answer, or else the context query was corrected in the answer sentence (correction information).

Working memory load improves early stages of independent visual processing.

Increasing evidence suggests that working memory and perceptual processes are dynamically interrelated due to modulating activity in overlapping brain networks. However, the direct influence of working memory on the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of behaviorally relevant intervening information remains unclear. To investigate this issue, subjects performed a visual proximity grid perception task under three different visual-spatial working memory (VSWM) load conditions.

Electrical neuroimaging reveals intensity-dependent activation of human cortical gustatory and somatosensory areas by electric taste.

To analyze the neural basis of electric taste we performed electrical neuroimaging analyses of event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded while participants received electrical pulses to the tongue. Pulses were presented at individual taste threshold to excite gustatory fibers selectively without concomitant excitation of trigeminal fibers and at high intensity evoking a prickling and, thus, activating trigeminal fibers. Sour, salty and metallic tastes were reported at both intensities while clear prickling was reported at high intensity only.

The brain tracks the energetic value in food images.

Do our brains implicitly track the energetic content of the foods we see? Using electrical neuroimaging of visual evoked potentials (VEPs) we show that the human brain can rapidly discern food's energetic value, vis à vis its fat content, solely from its visual presentation. Responses to images of high-energy and low-energy food differed over two distinct time periods. The first period, starting at approximately 165 ms post-stimulus onset, followed from modulations in VEP topography and by extension in the configuration of the underlying brain network.

Generating controlled image sets in cognitive neuroscience research.

The investigation of perceptual and cognitive functions with non-invasive brain imaging methods critically depends on the careful selection of stimuli for use in experiments. For example, it must be verified that any observed effects follow from the parameter of interest (e.g.

Neuroplasticity of sign language: implications from structural and functional brain imaging.

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate the neural correlates of German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache; DGS) processing. In particular, was expected the impact of the visuo-spatial mode in sign language on underlying neural networks compared to the impact of the interpretation of linguistic information.

Methods: For this purpose, two groups of participants took part in a functional MRI study at 3 Tesla.

Catching the news: Processing strategies in listening to dialogs as measured by ERPs.

Background: The online segmentation of spoken single sentences has repeatedly been associated with a particular event-related brain potential. The brain response could be attributed to the perception of major prosodic boundaries, and was termed Closure Positive Shift (CPS). However, verbal exchange between humans is mostly realized in the form of cooperative dialogs instead of loose strings of single sentences.

Inadequate and infrequent are not alike: ERPs to deviant prosodic patterns in spoken sentence comprehension.

The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation.