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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on February 9, 2005
Cerebral Cortex 2005 15(10):1602-1608; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi038
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Pictures of Appetizing Foods Activate Gustatory Cortices for Taste and Reward

W. Kyle Simmons1, Alex Martin2 and Lawrence W. Barsalou1

1 Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA and 2 Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Correspondence should be addressed to Lawrence W. Barsalou, Department of Psychology, Emory University, 532 North Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Email: barsalou{at}emory.ed.

Increasing research indicates that concepts are represented as distributed circuits of property information across the brain's modality-specific areas. The current study examines the distributed representation of an important but under-explored category, foods. Participants viewed pictures of appetizing foods (along with pictures of locations for comparison) during event-related fMRI. Compared to location pictures, food pictures activated the right insula/operculum and the left orbitofrontal cortex, both gustatory processing areas. Food pictures also activated regions of visual cortex that represent object shape. Together these areas contribute to a distributed neural circuit that represents food knowledge. Not only does this circuit become active during the tasting of actual foods, it also becomes active while viewing food pictures. Via the process of pattern completion, food pictures activate gustatory regions of the circuit to produce conceptual inferences about taste. Consistent with theories that ground knowledge in the modalities, these inferences arise as reenactments of modality-specific processing.

Key Words: concepts • fMRI • insula/operculum • knowledge • orbitofrontal cortex


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