Influence of implicit and explicit priming on nutritional fat habits and underlying neuronal networks.

• Applicant: Sabine Frank-Podlech, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 342185869

Food choice and intake is a daily and throughout normal subject. However, for more and more people eating habits and the question of food choice are of increasing interest and in several cases even a problem. The prevalence of obesity has tripled in the last decades and it is even spoken of an obesity epidemic. Life style interventions to lose weight often fail on the long run, also because people fall back into former unhealthy eating habits. Various factors influence our daily food choice, not all of which are apparent to ourselves. Thus, food choice might be goal-directed and therefore conscious and reflective, yet in other circumstances the choice to eat something specific might be based on eating habits which are automatic processes and thus difficult to control. Since a change in eating-behavior and long-lasting weight loss is most problematic to achieve, the current proposal aims to investigate implicit and explicit priming paradigms for changing habit-based and goal-directed nutritional behavior. For this, three studies are proposed. In a first study, the concept of implicit priming and explicit mindset priming (health mindset vs. palatability mindset) shall be investigated combined with a well-established Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer task to test goal-directed and habit-based behavior. In a second longitudinal study, the impact of fundamental weight loss induced by bariatric surgery on goal-directed and habit-based eating behavior will be targeted. In the third study, underlying neuronal correlates of implicit priming and mindset priming on goal-directed and habit-based eating behavior will be investigated in a normal-weight and an obese group using functional magnetic resonance imaging measurements. Here, especially structural, functional, and effective connectivity will be analyzed. Based on previous studies, the main neuronal target for connectivity hypothesis are the ventral and dorsal striatum, which represent major areas of the reward network and are strongly associated with goal-directed and habit-based behavior, respectively.Overall, the proposal aims to explore the benefit of explicit and implicit priming on food choices in normal-weight and obese individuals with a specific emphasis on the neuronal bases.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants