Does dietary learning occur outside awareness?

Brunstrom, Jeffrey Michael

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.05.004

Cited by 36 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 106 publications

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“…This suggests that restrained eating may be associated with more efficient conditioning since in both cases preferences are formed (or avoided) according to the presumed goals of the individual (avoiding calories and maximizing monetary reward). If so, this would also suggest the existence of some level of contingency awareness in restrained eaters – even though they are unable to articulate this association when explicitly asked (Brunstrom, 2004; Brunstrom & Higgs, 2002). …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory and reward association learning impairments in obesity

et al. 2014

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Obesity has been associated with impaired executive functions including working memory. Less explored is the influence of obesity on learning and memory. In the current study we assessed stimulus reward association learning, explicit learning and memory and working memory in healthy weight, overweight and obese individuals. Explicit learning and memory did not differ as a function of group. In contrast, working memory was significantly and similarly impaired in both overweight and obese individuals compared to the healthy weight group. In the first reward association learning task the obese, but not healthy weight or overweight participants consistently formed paradoxical preferences for a pattern associated with a negative outcome (fewer food rewards). To determine if the deficit was specific to food reward a second experiment was conducted using money. Consistent with experiment 1, obese individuals selected the pattern associated with a negative outcome (fewer monetary rewards) more frequently than healthy weight individuals and thus failed to develop a significant preference for the most rewarded patterns as was observed in the healthy weight group. Finally, on a probabilistic learning task, obese compared to healthy weight individuals showed deficits in negative, but not positive outcome learning. Taken together, our results demonstrate deficits in working memory and stimulus reward learning in obesity and suggest that obese individuals are impaired in learning to avoid negative outcomes.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory and reward association learning impairments in obesity

et al. 2014

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“…and delayed consequences (is it nutritious or poisonous? ; see Brunstrom, 2004). This enables the olfactory system to provide, encapsulated within the smell percept, information about the nutritional correlates of a potential food (e.g., is it energy dense?)…”

Section: The Human Olfactory Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human olfactory consciousness and cognition: its unusual features may not result from unusual functions but from limited neocortical processing resources

Stevenson

Attuquayefio

2013

Front. Psychol.

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Human and animal olfactory perception is shaped both by functional demands and by various environmental constraints seemingly peculiar to chemical stimuli. These demands and constraints may have generated a sensory system that is cognitively distinct from the major senses. In this article we identify these various functional demands and constraints, and examine whether they can be used to account for olfaction's unique cognitive features on a case-by-case basis. We then use this as grounds to argue that specific conscious processes do have functional value, a finding that naturally emerges when a comparative approach to consciousness across the senses is adopted. More generally, we conclude that certain peculiar features of olfactory cognition may owe more to limited neocortical processing resources, than they do to the challenges faced by perceiving chemical stimuli.

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“…Moreover, failures to find effects tend to be underreported as they can often be dismissed by the researchers as inadequately controlled designs, and certainly there are several studies in our laboratory and elsewhere [40] that add to the body of evidence that both types of flavour associations are elusive in humans. Some possible explanations for this variability in study outcome have been the focus of recent reviews which have explored the importance of conscious awareness of the underlying association for learning to proceed [41], and whether there may be a critical developmental period during which this learning typically occurs [40], and these issues are not considered 7 further here. Instead the focus here is on potential methodological explanations for different outcomes of apparently very similar studies.…”

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confidence: 99%

Flavour–nutrient learning in humans: An elusive phenomenon?

Yeomans

2012

Physiology & Behavior

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One widely cited model of how humans acquire liking for different foods is flavour-nutrient learning, where associations between the orosensory properties of the ingested food or drink (the flavour CS) and positive consequences of nutrient ingestion (the UCS) leads to acquired liking for the flavour (flavour-nutrient hedonic learning: FNL-H). Likewise, an association between the CS and the post-ingestive effects of ingested nutrients has been suggested to lead to learning about how satiating a particular food is (flavour-nutrient satiety learning: FNSH).However, whereas there is evidence for both FNL-H and FNL-S in experimental studies with non-human animals, evidence in humans is less convincing, with many failures to find the predicted changes in liking, preference or intake following repeated flavour-nutrient pairings.The present short review considers how subtle differences in experimental design might underlie this inconsistency, and identifies key design features which appear to increase the likelihood of success in human flavour-nutrient learning studies. Key factors include CS novelty, the level of nutrients ingested during training, the appetitive state of the consumer and individual consumer characteristics. A further complication is competition between FNL-H and FNL-S, and with other associations such as flavour-flavour learning. From this it is possible to make important inferences about the nature of human flavour-nutrient learning which firstly suggest that it has important similarities to that seen in other species, but secondly that the laboratory investigations of both FNL-H and FNL-S in humans can be compromised by subtle but important variations in experimental design. Running Head:Human flavour nutrient learning Key terms:Flavour, conditioning, learning, nutrients 3 4 Humans and other animals, in particular omnivores, have a remarkable ability to identify which of the almost endless supply of potential foods in are environment are nutritious and worth consuming and which are poisonous and so should be avoided. However, as described in the Omnivore's Paradox [1], humans are not born with a pre-set menu of preferred foods, but instead have to learn what is safe and nutritious by balancing neophobia and inquisitivity.Arguably the only component of our food preferences that appears to reflect an innate like is the case of a general preference for sweet tastes in humans and other species [2]. But evidence that not all humans do like sweet tastes [3] implies that even our initial liking for sweet tastes can be modified by experience, in line with reversal of an aversion to bitter tastes when the bitterness predicts a benefit, as is the case with caffeinated products [4].So how then do humans acquire liking for nutrient-rich foods? Historically, many different models for how humans acquire liking for novel flavours have been proposed [5,6] but in this brief review only one model, flavour-nutrient hedonic learning (FNL-H), will be considered as many have implied that this is likely to be the ...

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Does dietary learning occur outside awareness?

Cited by 36 publications

References 106 publications

Working memory and reward association learning impairments in obesity

Working memory and reward association learning impairments in obesity

Human olfactory consciousness and cognition: its unusual features may not result from unusual functions but from limited neocortical processing resources

Flavour–nutrient learning in humans: An elusive phenomenon?

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