Nineteenth Annual Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting

The 2012 CNS Meeting will be held in Chicago from March 31 to April 3. The schedule is packed with three and a half days of symposia, slide sessions, posters, and distinguished lectures.

It will be quite an Event, with sessions on Music and the Brain, Your Brain on Food, and more!

See you in Chicago!

Symposium Session 4

Tuesday, April 3, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm, Grand Ballroom

The Brain on Food: Investigations of motivation, dopamine and eating behaviors

Chair: Laura Martin, University of Kansas Medical Center
Speakers: W. Kyle Simmons, Susan Carnell, Dana M Small, Laura M Holsen

Food is a highly motivating stimulus in our environment. We eat for many non-homeostatic reasons, such as celebration, comfort, and hedonic pleasure. Novel investigations of the neural basis of healthy and disordered eating reveal that throughout the multisensory process of food consumption, sensory, reward processing and cognitive control brain regions work together to keep track of how rewarding the experience is and help us decide whether or not to continue eating. A complete cognitive neuroscience model of food motivation requires understanding the sensory, reward, and cognitive mechanisms associated with healthy eating, and how those mechanisms can run amok. The first talk will review recent fMRI studies in lean individuals which identify how neural systems involved in retrieving food taste and reward information contribute to food motivation and food-related decision making. The second talk describes a study that uses multi-modal (visual and auditory) food cues to examine a dynamic, distributed reward-related network specifically associated with subjective ratings of cue-induced desire to eat in lean and obese women. The third talk provides evidence suggesting that overweight individuals show deficits in dopamine-dependent learning, as indicated by reduced error signal generation in the OFC and ventral striatum, and impaired insula-mediated flavor-nutrient conditioning. The final talk will bring together evidence across the spectrum from healthy to disordered eating behaviors by examining the neural circuitry underlying differences in food motivation between anorexia, healthy weight, obese, and Prader-Willi syndrome populations. Together, the talks will provide a stimulating introduction to the networks involved in food motivation.