The impact of repeated sugar-sweetened versus non-sweetened beverage intake on brain response to the associated cue
Year: 2026
Type: other
Abstract: Cues in our environment can indicate the presence of food and can elicit a learned response (Belfort-DeAguiar & Seo, 2018). Research in humans and animals shows that neural response to cues paired with receipt of food increases across trials, a process known as incentive sensitization (Berridge & Robinson, 2016). Many food-cue learning studies compare neural response to a target taste (often sweet and containing an identifiable flavor) and a control taste without flavor (for example (Stice et al., 2008)), which offers minimal insight into the role of food stimulus properties on the process of cue sensitization. Additionally, while evidence shows that there may be genetic influences on sweet taste perception (Dias et al., 2015; Melis et al., 2022; Stevens et al., 2025), no research has examined whether TAS1R2 genotype is associated with incentive sensitization of a cue linked with a sweet stimulus. Finally, individual differences like body mass index (BMI) are related to overall level of learned food cue neural response (Stice et al., 2008) and neural response to previously learned cues, like images of food (Meng et al., 2020), but limited research has investigated the association between BMI and the process of food cue sensitization. The process of food-cue sensitization may vary based on stimulus factors, like the properties of the food paired with a cue, and may be associated with individual differences, like individual taste sensitivity or typical eating behavior. However, associations between these factors and the neural process of incentive sensitization remains largely unexplored. In this secondary data analysis, our goal is to determine how cue-induced neural response changes across trials and to disentangle the relative contributions of caloric sweetness and flavor in the incentive salience process. Furthermore, we will examine individual differences, such as BMI and TAS1R2 (SNP: rs35874116) polymorphism that may be associated with food-cue sensitization.
Source: Open Science Framework
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7206152648