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The unique neural circuits underlying top-down and bottom-up motivated self-control during nutritional decision making

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 2 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon D.

Matthew D. Bachman¹ (), Rémi Janet², Anita Tusche², Cendri A. Hutcherson¹; ¹University of Toronto, ²Queens University

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is thought to encode an overall value signal based on a weighted sum of an option’s attributes. Studies of dietary food choice show that individuals tend to naturally weigh tastiness over healthiness and, consequently, choose tasty but unhealthy foods. One well-studied approach to encouraging healthier food choices is through top-down cognitive regulation strategies. However, neural data suggests that regulation does not consistently modulate how the vmPFC represents attributes and instead relies upon compensatory mechanisms initiated by other regions. Here we test the idea that changes in bottom-up, physiological states may help individuals naturally attend to health information more, particularly in conjunction with cognitive regulation strategies. To do this, we manipulated participants’ (current n = 32 out of 50) hunger levels across two fMRI study sessions while they alternated between making food choices naturally or using cognitive regulatory strategies. Behavioral analyses indicate that both regulation and being physiologically satiated helped participants incorporate healthiness more into their choices while reducing the influence of tastiness. Furthermore, the combination of these effects produced the greatest weighting of health on choices. However, fMRI analyses suggest that these different forms of motivated self-control exerted unique changes in vmPFC activity. Regulation increased the vmPFC’s sensitivity to healthiness but did not affect taste. Conversely, satiation decreased taste representations as well as the vmPFC’s correlation with preferences, while health representations remained unchanged. The current findings suggest that different forms of motivated self-control exert independent, attribute-specific changes in vmPFC activity.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making