Neuroscience Seminar Series for Rising Scholars: Emma Schweitzer
“Food Craving Amplifies Brain and Behavioral Indices of Subjective Value for Palatable Foods”
Date and Time: Monday, February 23, 2026, , 12:00 PM
Speaker: Emma Schweitzer, PhD student, PI: Anna Konova, PhD
In-Person: Room 127, Staged Research Building (SRB), Busch Campus
Join via Zoom: Please email the host, Dr. Noelle Stiles (noelle.stiles@rutgers.edu), or check the CAHBIR Slack #General thread for the link.
Abstract: Food craving profoundly influences dietary choice, yet the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which this occurs remain poorly understood. Brain regions associated with reward value and interoception have been implicated in past work, but these studies have primarily relied on passive cue-reactivity paradigms that often fail to capture how craving intersects with subjective valuation and choice. To address this gap, here we paired a selective multisensory food cue reactivity/craving induction with an incentivized fMRI dietary decision-making task (N=42). Behaviorally, participants showed significant, selective increases in the value they assigned to craved (but not dissimilar) snacks following induction, especially when snacks were offered at higher quantities, consistent with craving narrowing and focusing motivation. Neurally, canonical value regions (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum) tracked the interaction between similarity and quantity that drove post-induction changes in value judgements. Interestingly, individual differences in body mass index (BMI) moderated these effects: participants with higher BMI showed reduced similarity-based scaling, suggesting a less selective influence of craving on both behavior and neural value regions. By contrast, regions outside the canonical valuation network showed distinct patterns. The insula tracked global shifts in state (post- vs. pre-induction), while the amygdala encoded snack similarity and quantity independent of global state. Together, these findings support a distributed craving circuit integrating value, interoceptive, and emotional processes. This circuit dynamically encodes food-related state and stimulus attributes and may contribute to maladaptive dietary decision-making behavior, particularly in individuals with higher weight status.
