Differences in BOLD responses in brain reward network reflect the tendency to assimilate a surprising flavor stimulus to an expected stimulus.

External information can modify the subjective value of a tasted stimulus, but little is known about neural mechanisms underlying these behavioral modifications. This study used flavored drinks to produce variable degrees of discrepancy between expected and received flavor. During a learning session, 43 healthy young men learned 4 symbol-flavor associations. In a separate session, associations were presented again during an fMRI scan, but half of the trials introduced discrepancy with previously learned associations. Liking ratings of drinks were collected and were analyzed using a linear model to define the degree to which discrepant symbols affected liking ratings of the subjects during the fMRI session. Based on these results, a GLM analysis of fMRI data was conducted to determine neural correlates of observed behavior. Groups of subjects were composed based on their behavior in response to discrepant symbols, and comparison of brain activity between groups showed that activation in the PCC and the caudate nucleus was more potent in those subjects in which liking was not affected by discrepant symbols. These activations were not found in subjects who assimilated unexpected flavors to flavors preceeded by discrepant symbols. Instead, these subjects showed differences in the activity in the parietal operculum. The activity of reward network appears to be related to assimilation of received flavor to expected flavor in response to symbol-flavor discrepancy.

Using High Spatial Resolution to Improve BOLD fMRI Detection at 3T.

For different functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments using blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast, the acquisition of T2*-weighted scans at a high spatial resolution may be advantageous in terms of time-course signal-to-noise ratio and of BOLD sensitivity when the regions are prone to susceptibility artifacts. In this study, we explore this solution by examining how spatial resolution influences activations elicited when appetizing food pictures are viewed. Twenty subjects were imaged at 3 T with two different voxel volumes, 3.4 µl and 27 µl. Despite the diminution of brain coverage, we found that high-resolution acquisition led to a better detection of activations. Though known to suffer to different degrees from susceptibility artifacts, the activations detected by high spatial resolution were notably consistent with those reported in published activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses, corresponding to taste-responsive regions. Furthermore, these regions were found activated bilaterally, in contrast with previous findings. Both the reduction of partial volume effect, which improves BOLD contrast, and the mitigation of susceptibility artifact, which boosts the signal to noise ratio in certain regions, explained the better detection noted with high resolution. The present study provides further evidences that high spatial resolution is a valuable solution for human BOLD fMRI, especially for studying food-related stimuli.

fMRI of human olfaction at the individual level: interindividual variability.

PURPOSE: To determine whether the range of normal variation of human olfactory functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations in healthy single subjects is compatible with the detection of atypical patterns. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In an event-related olfactory experiment, the variability of fMRI activation in six bilateral olfactory areas known to be affected in neurodegenerative diseases was measured in a region of interest (ROI) analysis in terms of intensity, localization, and overlap on 51 subjects. fMRI measurements were compared against measurements from a visual experiment performed on 25 subjects. RESULTS: Olfaction induced activations with low intensity, high variability, and a 4-fold lower contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) than vision. Even in the best case (piriform cortex), mean pairwise activation overlap was still less than 40%. None of the olfactory ROIs showed significant activation for all subjects at the permissive threshold of P < 0.001. A gender-dependent significantly stronger activation was found in the bilateral piriform cortex of male subjects. CONCLUSION: Linking t-statistics and CNR showed that for all olfactory ROIs, CNR is either near or below the estimated threshold of 0.73 found to be necessary to obtain significant activations. In our experimental conditions the low reliability of olfactory activations should prompt major reservations over using fMRI of human olfaction as a diagnostic tool in single subjects.