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Published on: June 5, 2016
Food go/no-go training changes food wanting in women: Behavioral, brain activity, and choice outcomes
Yingkai Yang1, Yaoyao Zhang2, Haishuo Xia1
1Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China.
Appetite
|August 7, 2026
Summary
Learning to avoid certain foods, through go/no-go training, significantly reduces wanting for those foods. This behavioral change is linked to altered brain activity in specific regions, impacting food evaluation and choice.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Behavioral Economics
Background:
- Food evaluations are susceptible to cognitive biases.
- Behavioral interventions can modify food preferences and choices.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of go/no-go training on food wanting.
- To identify the neural correlates of altered food evaluation.
- To explore effective connectivity changes in response to training.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
- Participants underwent go/no-go training with specific foods.
- Food wanting was assessed via self-report ratings before and after training.
Main Results:
- Food wanting ratings for "no-go" foods significantly decreased post-training.
- fMRI data revealed reduced blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses in the middle frontal, middle occipital, and inferior occipital gyri.
- Dynamic causal modeling indicated modulation of effective connectivity between these regions, particularly the middle and inferior occipital gyri.
Conclusions:
- Simple response inhibition (no-go) can devalue foods.
- Changes in subjective food evaluation are associated with neural activity in specific brain regions.
- These evaluation changes may influence immediate post-training food choices.
