How Cognition Modulates Affective Responses to Taste and Flavor: Top-down Influences on the Orbitofrontal and Pregenual Cingulate Cortices

Grabenhorst, Fabian; Rolls, Edmund T.; Bilderbeck, Amy C.

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm185

Cited by 286 publications

(234 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…An implication of this study and further studies showing cognitive modulation of affective representations in the orbitofrontal cortex of taste and flavour (Grabenhorst et al 2007) and touch (McCabe et al 2008) is that even at the first stage in the processing of visual, taste, olfactory, and somatosensory stimuli at which the emotional or affective value is made explicit in the representation, the orbitofrontal cortex (Rolls 2005b(Rolls , 2008, top^down cognitive influences can bias representations, so that the emotion felt can be directly influenced (biased, or mildly`pre-empted'), at a relatively early level of cortical processing, by the cognitive state. This makes it clear that the types of top^down attentional processing described in this paper for vision apply to other modalities too, and indeed they probably are implemented by the same type of top^down biased competition process (Rolls 2008).…”

Section: Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindnesssupporting

confidence: 54%

Top — Down Control of Visual Perception: Attention in Natural Vision

Rolls

2008

Perception

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IntroductionPre-emptive perception can be used to describe a situation in which a motor command influences perception. An example might be a command for a saccadic eye movement, in which a corollary discharge cancels the changed sensory input produced by the movement of the eyes, contributing to stability of visual perception (Wurtz and Sommer 2004). Here, I consider a somewhat different situation in which prior expectations influence visual perception. These prior expectations might consist of top^down attentional influences on object or spatial processing, or they might consist of prior knowledge of the world which can influence what is seen, as in, for example, the perception of a Necker cube as three-dimensional. A particular focus of this paper is on how attention operates in natural, cluttered, visual scenes, where its influence is much more restricted than when two objects are presented on a blank background. The neurophysiological approach to how attention operates in natural vision leads to hypotheses about the binding problem in perception; about how object representations are interfaced to action systems; and about change blindness. It is shown that even cognitive influences produced by a word descriptor can by top^down processing`pre-empt' affective perception in the olfactory, taste, flavour, somatosensory, and emotional systems, by a top^down modulation of representations in the orbitofrontal cortex. These top^down effects do not pre-empt perception in the sense that they override it. Indeed, it is important that bottom^up inputs dominate the processing to avoid hallucinatory activity. Instead, top^down processes can bias visual perception, in ways for which we now have clear computational-neuroscience models at the level of integrate-and-fire neurons, which show that the top^down effects are most evident when the bottom^up input is weak or ambiguous. The processes described here provide a way for understanding not only top^down effects in attention, but also top^down effects that are Abstract. Top^down perceptual influences can bias (or pre-empt) perception. In natural scenes, the receptive fields of neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex (IT) shrink to become close to the size of objects. This facilitates the read-out of information from the ventral visual system, because the information is primarily about the object at the fovea. Top^down attentional influences are much less evident in natural scenes than when objects are shown against blank backgrounds, though are still present. It is suggested that the reduced receptive-field size in natural scenes, and the effects of top^down attention contribute to change blindness. The receptive fields of IT neurons in complex scenes, though including the fovea, are frequently asymmetric around the fovea, and it is proposed that this is the solution the IT uses to represent multiple objects and their relative spatial positions in a scene. Networks that implement probabilistic decision-making are described, and it is suggested that, when in perceptua...

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Section: Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindnesssupporting

confidence: 54%

Top — Down Control of Visual Perception: Attention in Natural Vision

Rolls

2008

Perception

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“…50 The primary taste cortex in the anterior insula of humans represents the identity and intensity of taste in that activations there correlate with the subjective intensity of the taste, and the orbitofrontal and ACC represents the reward value of taste, in that activations there correlate with the subjective pleasantness of taste. 52,53 We also found activation of the human amygdala by the taste of glucose. 49 Extending this study, O'Doherty et al 50 showed that the human amygdala was as much activated by the affectively pleasant taste of glucose as by the affectively negative taste of NaCl, and thus provided evidence that the human amygdala is not especially involved in processing aversive as compared with rewarding stimuli.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 53%

“…52,73 This has implications for further ways in which food intake can be controlled by cognitive factors, and this needs further investigation. For example, the cognitive factors that have been analyzed in these studies are descriptors of the reward value of the food, such as 'rich and delicious'.…”

Section: Cognitive Factors and Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste, olfactory and food texture reward processing in the brain and obesity

2010

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Complementary neuronal recordings and functional neuroimaging in humans, show that the primary taste cortex in the anterior insula provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature and texture (including fat texture) of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. One synapse on, in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), these sensory inputs are for some neurons combined by learning with olfactory and visual inputs, and these neurons encode food reward in that they only respond to food when hungry, and in that activations correlate with subjective pleasantness. Cognitive factors, including word-level descriptions, and attention, modulate the representation of the reward value of food in the OFC. Further, there are individual differences in the representation of the reward value of food in the OFC. It is argued that overeating and obesity are related in many cases to an increased reward value of the sensory inputs produced by foods, and their modulation by cognition and attention, which overrides existing satiety signals. It is proposed that control of all rather than one or several of these factors that influence food reward and eating may be important in the prevention and treatment of overeating and obesity.

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“…There are several ways that one can propose by which disrupted dopaminergic activation of the OFC and the CG could increase the risk for overeating. The medial OFC is involved with salience attribution including the value of food (Rolls and McCabe, 2007;Grabenhorst et al, 2007;Tremblay and Schultz, 1999) and thus its activation secondary to food-induced DA stimulation could result in an intense motivation to consume food with a concomitant inability to inhibit it. Moreover, because disruption in the activity of the OFC results in impairment in the reversal of learned associations when a reinforcer is devalued (Gallagher et al, 1999) this could result in continued eating when the value of food is devalued by satiety and could explain why damage of the OFC is associated with compulsive behaviors including overeating (Butter et al, 1963, Johnson, 1971.…”

Section: Association Between D2 Receptors and Prefrontal Metabolismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low dopamine striatal D2 receptors are associated with prefrontal metabolism in obese subjects: Possible contributing factors

et al. 2008

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Dopamine's role in inhibitory control is well recognized and its disruption may contribute to behavioral disorders of discontrol such as obesity. However, the mechanism by which impaired dopamine neurotransmission interferes with inhibitory control is poorly understood. We had previously documented a reduction in dopamine D2 receptors in morbidly obese subjects. To assess if the reductions in dopamine D2 receptors were associated with activity in prefrontal brain regions implicated in inhibitory control we assessed the relationship between dopamine D2 receptor availability in striatum with brain glucose metabolism (marker of brain function) in ten morbidly obese subjects (BMI>40 kg/m 2 ) and compared it to that in twelve non-obese controls. PET was used with [ 11 C]raclopride to assess D2 receptors and with [ 18 F] FDG to assess regional brain glucose metabolism. In obese subjects striatal D2 receptor availability was lower than controls and was positively correlated with metabolism in dorsolateral prefrontal, medial orbitofrontal, anterior cingulate gyrus and somatosensory cortices. In controls correlations with prefrontal metabolism were not significant but comparisons with those in obese subjects were not significant, which does not permit to ascribe the associations as unique to obesity. The associations between striatal D2 receptors and prefrontal metabolism in obese subjects suggest that decreases in striatal D2 receptors could contribute to overeating via their modulation of striatal prefrontal pathways, which participate in inhibitory control and salience attribution. The association between striatal D2 receptors and metabolism in somatosensory cortices (regions that process palatability) could underlie one of the mechanisms through which dopamine regulates the reinforcing properties of food. KeywordsOrbitofrontal cortex; Cingulate gyrus; Dorsolateral prefrontal; Dopamine transporters; Raclopride, PET The increase in obesity and associated metabolic diseases seen over the past decade has raised concern that if not controlled this may become the number one preventable public health threat for the 21st century (Sturm, 2002 (Berthoud, 2007). The extent to which individuals differ in their ability to inhibit these responses and control how much they eat is likely to modulate their risk for overeating in our current food rich environments (Berthoud, 2007).We had shown that in healthy individuals D2 receptor availability in the striatum modulated eating behavioral patterns (Volkow et al., 2003). Specifically the tendency to eat when exposed to negative emotions was negatively correlated with D2 receptor availability (the lower the D2 receptors the higher the likelihood that an individual would eat if emotionally stressed). In addition, in a different study, we showed that morbidly obese subjects (BMI>40) had lower than normal D2 receptor availability and these reductions were proportional to their BMI (Wang et al., 2001). These findings led us to postulate that low D2 receptor availability could put an...

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How Cognition Modulates Affective Responses to Taste and Flavor: Top-down Influences on the Orbitofrontal and Pregenual Cingulate Cortices

Cited by 286 publications

References 66 publications

Top — Down Control of Visual Perception: Attention in Natural Vision

Top — Down Control of Visual Perception: Attention in Natural Vision

Taste, olfactory and food texture reward processing in the brain and obesity

Low dopamine striatal D2 receptors are associated with prefrontal metabolism in obese subjects: Possible contributing factors

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