Instance pair of meals and non-food (heart-shaped cake and heart-shaped cardboard storage field). Credit score: Martin Binks
Shut your eyes and visualize the next: a decadent piece of chocolate cake, a bouquet of totally bloomed purple roses, a juicy peach. Hopefully, these psychological photographs produced some type of constructive feeling. However is it doable that, regardless of the feel-good feelings related to all of them, our brains react otherwise to food-specific gadgets?
The reply: sure, and understanding the distinction could also be extra necessary than you beforehand thought.
“Our brains are wired to react to the environment around us, but different stimuli produce different responses,” mentioned metabolic illness skilled Martin Binks.
Measuring our mind’s response to the meals setting is important for nutrition-related behavioral well being and weight administration interventions. Meals Cue Reactivity (FCR) picture banks permit diet scientists to find out how publicity to food-related environmental stimuli could influence the mind and, in the end, consuming habits.
In FCR analysis, members are proven a big set of picture pairs—half of that are non-food gadgets comparable to combs, automobile keys, or baskets of flowers. The opposite half are meals photographs, like bowls of strawberries, greens, hamburgers, or cake.
Researchers measure how reactive a person’s mind is to meals photographs in comparison with how their mind reacts to non-food photographs. For this to be dependable, the non-food and meals photographs have to be visually comparable (colour, measurement, form), and researchers additionally want to grasp the relative attraction of each the objects and the meals gadgets; elements ignored in previous picture banks.
Instance pair of meals and non-food (basket of roses and basket of strawberries). Credit score: Martin Binks
“For the research to be accurate, we need the non-food to be paired with food items that are visually similar, and we must also have pictures that represent a range of appeal ratings (both food and non-food objects). Pizza, for example, may be a high appeal food and a Lamborghini a high appeal object, while broccoli and a set of keys are low appeal. Together, this gives us much more confidence that the brain responses we are seeing are about food,” mentioned Binks, professor and chair of George Mason College’s Division of Diet and Meals Research.
Binks co-developed and examined a novel FCR picture financial institution that gives extra precision when measuring the mind’s reactions to meals. This new picture financial institution corrects a deficiency in current FCR picture banks—they lack visible consistency and, due to this fact, are restricted of their capacity to supply scientifically correct outcomes.
“We want to measure reactions purely to the food item and minimize responses to irrelevant stimuli as much as possible. The Food Cue Reactivity image bank we have made available makes it so that we can see how the brain ‘lights up’ at the sight of food, without the risk of being influenced by visual distractions that can compromise results,” mentioned Binks.
The picture financial institution developed by Binks is brazenly accessible to be used by students throughout all disciplines in search of to review the food-related mind responses.
The brand new picture financial institution, developed alongside fellow researcher William R. Quarles, Ph.D., ensures attraction scores and visible traits of photographs are accounted for. This refined technique will enhance analysis to higher perceive folks’s the connection with meals. Binks’ work will inform future diet analysis and interventions.
“This image bank will ultimately make the research more accurate and consistent and save other researchers a lot of time spent developing their own image banks,” mentioned Binks.
“The development and testing of the TTU food cue reactivity image bank” was revealed in July 2025 within the Worldwide Journal of Weight problems.
Extra data:
William R. Quarles et al, The event and testing of the TTU meals cue reactivity picture financial institution, Worldwide Journal of Weight problems (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41366-025-01856-9
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George Mason College
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Up to date meals reactivity instrument explains why we eat what we see (2025, September 3)
retrieved 3 September 2025
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