The human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been associated with food reward processing and is thought to represent modality-independent signals of value. Food tastiness and health are core attributes of many models of food choice and dietary self-control. Here we used functional neuroimaging to examine the neural representation of tastiness and health for a set of 28 food categories selected to be orthogonal with respect to both dimensions. Using representational similarity analysis, in conjunction with linear mixed-effects modeling, we demonstrate that the OFC spontaneously encodes food health, whereas tastiness was associated with greater neural dissimilarity. Subsequent analyses using model dissimilarity matrices that encode overall tastiness magnitude demonstrated that the neural representation of foods grows more distinct with increasing tastiness but not with increasing health. In a separate study, we use lexical analysis of natural language descriptions of food to show that food tastiness is associated with more elaborate descriptions of food. Together these data show not only that the OFC spontaneously encodes the dimensions of health and tastiness when viewing appetitive food cues, but also that the neural and cognitive representations of food categories that are the highest in tastiness are more refined than those lower in tastiness.

中文翻译：

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眶额叶皮层自发地编码食物健康，并包含对味道最高的食物的更多不同表示

人类眶额皮层 (OFC) 长期以来一直与食物奖励处理相关联，被认为代表了与模态无关的价值信号。食物的美味和健康是许多食物选择和饮食自我控制模型的核心属性。在这里，我们使用功能性神经成像来检查一组 28 种食物类别的美味和健康的神经表征，这些类别被选择为在两个维度上都是正交的。使用代表性相似性分析，结合线性混合效应模型，我们证明 OFC 自发地编码食物健康，而美味与更大的神经差异相关。使用编码整体美味程度的模型相异矩阵进行的后续分析表明，食物的神经表征随着味道的增加而变得更加明显，但随着健康的增加则不然。在另一项研究中，我们对食物的自然语言描述进行词法分析，以表明食物的味道与更精细的食物描述有关。这些数据一起表明，OFC 不仅在查看令人食欲大开的食物线索时自发地编码健康和美味的维度，而且味道最高的食物类别的神经和认知表征比味道低的食物类别更精细。我们使用对食物的自然语言描述的词法分析来表明食物的味道与更精细的食物描述有关。这些数据一起表明，OFC 不仅在查看令人食欲大开的食物线索时自发地编码健康和美味的维度，而且味道最高的食物类别的神经和认知表征比味道低的食物类别更精细。我们使用对食物的自然语言描述的词法分析来表明食物的味道与更精细的食物描述有关。这些数据一起表明，OFC 不仅在查看令人食欲大开的食物线索时自发地编码健康和美味的维度，而且味道最高的食物类别的神经和认知表征比味道低的食物类别更精细。