Association between eating behavior and the immediate neural activity caused by viewing food images presented in and out of awareness: A magnetoencephalography study

Obesity is a serious health problem in modern society. Considering the fact that the outcomes of treatments targeting appetitive behavior are suboptimal, one potential reason proposed for these poor outcomes is that appetitive behavior is driven more by unconscious decision-making processes than by the conscious ones targeted by traditional behavioral treatments. In this study, we aimed to investigate both the conscious and unconscious decision-making processes related to eating behavior, and to examine whether an interaction related to eating behavior exists between conscious and unconscious neural processes. The study was conducted on healthy male volunteers who viewed pictures of food and non-food items presented both above and below the awareness threshold. The oscillatory brain activity affected by viewing the pictures was assessed by magnetoencephalography. A visual backward masking procedure was used to present the pictures out of awareness. Neural activity corresponding to the interactions between sessions (i.e., food or non-food) and conditions (i.e., visible or invisible) was observed in left Brodmann’s areas 45 and 47 in the high-gamma (60–200 Hz) frequency range. The interactions were associated with eating behavior indices such as emotional eating and cognitive restraint, suggesting that conscious and unconscious neural processes are differently involved in eating behavior. These findings provide valuable clues for devising methods to assess conscious and unconscious appetite regulation in individuals with normal or abnormal eating behavior.