Abstract
Behavioral change studies and interventions focus on self-control and external reinforcements to influence preferences. Cue-approach training (CAT) has been shown to induce preference changes lasting months by merely associating items with neutral cues and speeded responses. We utilized this paradigm to study neural representation of preferences and their modification without external reinforcements. We scanned 36 participants with fMRI during a novel passive viewing task before, after and 30 days following CAT. We preregistered the predictions that activity in memory, top-down attention, and value-processing regions will underlie preference modification. While most theories associate preferences with prefrontal regions, we found that “bottom-up” perceptual mechanisms were associated with immediate change, whereas reduced “top-down” parietal activity was related to long-term change. Activity in value-related prefrontal regions was enhanced immediately after CAT for trained items and 1 month after for all items. Our findings suggest a novel neural mechanism of preference representation and modification. We suggest that nonreinforced change of preferences occurs initially in perceptual representation of items, putatively leading to long-term changes in “top-down” processes. These findings offer implementation of bottom-up instead of top-down targeted interventions for long-lasting behavioral change.
Highlights
Changing behavior is key to solving a broad range of challenges in public health
We introduce a novel passive viewing task, whereby pictures of snack food items are individually presented on the screen, while participants perform a sham counting task
Behavioral results with snack food items from previous studies (Bakkour et al, 2017; Salomon et al, 2018; Schonberg et al, 2014) and from the current study demonstrated a differential pattern of the change of preferences across value levels: Preference modifications were more robust for high-value compared to low-value items; we chose to focus on the functional changes in the representation of high-value items
Summary
Changing behavior is key to solving a broad range of challenges in public health. Understanding how preferences are constructed and modified is a major challenge in the research of human behavior with broad implications, from basic science to offering long-lasting behavioral change programs (Marteau, Hollands, & Fletcher, 2012; Vlaev, Chater, Stewart, & Brown, 2011). In a recently introduced paradigm, named cue-approach training (CAT), preferences for snack food items were successfully modified in the absence of external reinforcements (Schonberg et al, 2014). In the CAT paradigm, the mere association of images of items with a cue and a speeded button-press response lead to preference changes lasting months following a single training session (Salomon et al, 2018; Schonberg et al, 2014). Preference change following the task has been shown to last up to six months following a single training session lasting less than one hour, suggesting the task has potential to be translated into a real-world intervention and that it involves long-term memory components
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