The effect of hunger and state preferences on the neural processing of food images

A preprint of the manuscript can be found on bioRxiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.09.674354

The experiment and analysis code can be found via the Open Science Framework: doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZFD7P

Experiment Details:
Human electroencephalography recordings from 23 participants, who did a letter task and calorie categorisation task. In the letter task, participants viewed rapid streams of overlaid food/non-food images and letters, pressing a button whenever they saw a vowel, while ignoring the images. This setup directed attention away from the visual objects, making them task-irrelevant. In contrast, the calorie categorisation task required participants to actively evaluate each food image and classify it as higher or lower in calories than bread, by pressing a button.

Experiment length: 1 hour