Most studies that examine responses to food cues use images of actual foods as stimuli. Since foods are rewarding in multiple ways, it then becomes difficult to try and partial out the role of the importance of different aspects of food reward. Here we aimed to evaluate the impact of novel visual cues specifically associated with the immediate sensory reward from a liked sweet taste. In the training phase, one visual cue (CSsweet) was associated with the experience of sweet taste (10%sucrose) and a second, control cue (CSneutral) with a neutral taste (artificial saliva) using a disguised training procedure. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 45) were given an ad libitum snack intake test 30 min post-training, either labelled with CSsweet or CSneutral. Total caloric consumption was significantly higher in the CSsweet (650 ± 47kcal) than CSneutral (477 ± 45kcal) condition, but ratings of liking for the snacks did not differ significantly between conditions. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 80) exhibited an overall attentional bias (22.1 ± 9.9 msec) for the CSsweet relative to CSneutral cue (assessed using a dot-probe task), however rated liking for the CSsweet did not change significantly after cue-sweet training. Likewise, measures of expected satiety for drinks labelled with CSsweet did not differ significantly from CSneutral. Overall these two experiments provide evidence that associations between neutral visual cues and the experience of a liked sweet taste leads to cue-potentiated eating in the presence of the CSsweet cue. With no evidence that cue-sweet training altered rated liking for the visual cues, and in keeping with extant literature on the dissociation of hedonic and rewarding properties of food rewards, we propose this potentiation effect to reflect increased incentive salience.

大多数检查对食物线索的反应的研究使用实际食物的图像作为刺激。由于食物以多种方式提供奖励，因此很难尝试和部分排除食物奖励不同方面重要性的作用。在这里，我们旨在评估与喜欢的甜味的即时感官奖励特别相关的新视觉线索的影响。在训练阶段，一个视觉线索 (CSsweet) 与甜味体验 (10% 蔗糖) 相关联，第二个控制线索 (CSneutral) 与使用伪装训练程序的中性味道（人工唾液）相关联。在实验 1 中，参与者（n = 45）在训练后 30 分钟接受随意零食摄入量测试，标记为 CSsweet 或 CSneutral。CSsweet (650 ± 47kcal) 条件下的总热量消耗明显高于 CSneutral (477 ± 45kcal) 条件，但在不同条件下对零食的喜欢程度没有显着差异。在实验 2 中，参与者（n = 80）对 CSsweet 相对于 CSneutral 提示（使用点探针任务评估）表现出整体注意力偏差（22.1 ± 9.9 毫秒），但是在提示后对 CSsweet 的评级喜好没有显着变化- 甜蜜的训练。同样，标有 CSsweet 的饮料的预期饱腹感测量与 CSneutral 没有显着差异。总的来说，这两个实验提供了证据，表明中性视觉线索和喜欢的甜味体验之间的关联导致在 CSsweet 线索存在下线索强化进食。