“Food is central to human social interactions and cultural practices. It’s not just sustenance,” says Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. “Food is core to so many elements of our cultural identity, religious practice, and social interactions, and many other things that humans do.”
The findings, based mostly on an evaluation of a giant public database of human mind responses to a set of 10,000 photographs, elevate many further questions on how and why this neural inhabitants develops. In future research, the researchers hope to discover how individuals’s responses to sure meals would possibly differ relying on their likes and dislikes, or their familiarity with sure kinds of meals.
Advertisement
MIT postdoc Meenakshi Khosla is the lead creator of the paper, together with MIT analysis scientist N. Apurva Ratan Murty. The examine seems within the journal Current Biology.
Visual Categories
More than 20 years in the past, whereas finding out the ventral visible stream, the a part of the mind that acknowledges objects, Kanwisher found cortical areas that reply selectively to faces. Later, she and different scientists found different areas that reply selectively to locations, our bodies, or phrases. Most of these areas had been found when researchers particularly got down to search for them. However, that hypothesis-driven strategy can restrict what you find yourself discovering, Kanwisher says.
“There could be other things that we might not think to look for,” she says. “And even when we find something, how do we know that that’s actually part of the basic dominant structure of that pathway, and not something we found just because we were looking for it?”
To attempt to uncover the basic construction of the ventral visible stream, Kanwisher and Khosla determined to investigate a big, publicly accessible dataset of full-brain purposeful magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses from eight human topics as they seen 1000’s of photographs.
“We wanted to see when we apply a data-driven, hypothesis-free strategy, what kinds of selectivities pop up, and whether those are consistent with what had been discovered before. A second goal was to see if we could discover novel selectivities that either haven’t been hypothesized before, or that have remained hidden due to the lower spatial resolution of fMRI data,” Khosla says.
To try this, the researchers utilized a mathematical technique that permits them to find neural populations that may’t be recognized from conventional fMRI information. An fMRI picture is made up of many voxels three-dimensional models that symbolize a dice of mind tissue. Each voxel incorporates a whole lot of 1000’s of neurons, and if a few of these neurons belong to smaller populations that reply to at least one kind of visible enter, their responses could also be drowned out by different populations throughout the identical voxel.
The new analytical technique, which Kanwisher’s lab has beforehand used on fMRI information from the auditory cortex, can tease out responses of neural populations inside every voxel of fMRI information.
Using this strategy, the researchers discovered 4 populations that corresponded to beforehand recognized clusters that reply to faces, locations, our bodies, and phrases. “That tells us that this method works, and it tells us that the things that we found before are not just obscure properties of that pathway, but major, dominant properties,” Kanwisher says.
Intriguingly, a fifth inhabitants additionally emerged, and this one seemed to be selective for photographs of meals.
“We were first quite puzzled by this because food is not a visually homogenous category,” Khosla says. “Things like apples and corn and pasta all look so unlike each other, yet we found a single population that responds similarly to all these diverse food items.”
The food-specific inhabitants, which the researchers name the ventral meals element (VFC), seems to be unfold throughout two clusters of neurons, situated on both facet of the FFA.
“We think that food selectivity had been harder to characterize before because the populations that are selective for food are intermingled with other nearby populations that have distinct responses to other stimulus attributes. The low spatial resolution of fMRI prevents us from seeing this selectivity because the responses of different neural population get mixed in a voxel,” Khosla says.
Food vs Non-food
The researchers additionally used the information to coach a computational mannequin of the VFC, based mostly on earlier fashions Murty had developed for the mind’s face and place recognition areas. This allowed the researchers to run further experiments and predict the responses of the VFC. In one experiment, they fed the mannequin matched photographs of meals and non-food objects that seemed very related for instance, a banana and a yellow crescent moon.
“Those matched stimuli have very similar visual properties, but the main attribute in which they differ is edible versus inedible,” Khosla says. “We could feed those arbitrary stimuli through the predictive model and see whether it would still respond more to food than non-food, without having to collect the fMRI data.”
They may additionally use the computational mannequin to investigate a lot bigger datasets, consisting of hundreds of thousands of photographs. Those simulations helped to verify that the VFC is extremely selective for photographs of meals.
From their evaluation of the human fMRI information, the researchers discovered that in some topics, the VFC responded barely extra to processed meals resembling pizza than unprocessed meals like apples. In the longer term they hope to discover how elements resembling familiarity and like or dislike of a selected meals would possibly have an effect on people’ responses to that meals.
They additionally hope to check when and the way this area turns into specialised throughout early childhood, and what different elements of the mind it communicates with. Another query is whether or not this food-selective inhabitants will likely be seen in different animals resembling monkeys, who don’t connect the cultural significance to meals that people do.
The analysis was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Eye Institute, and the National Science Foundation by means of the MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.
Source: Eurekalert
