Transcranial magnetic stimulation of medial prefrontal cortex modulates implicit attitudes towards food

Abstract

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is known to be associated with food representation and monitoring of eating behaviour, but the neural mechanisms underlying attitudes towards food are still unclear. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used in combination with the implicit association test (IAT) to investigate the causal role of mPFC in controlling implicit food evaluation in healthy volunteers. Participants performed an IAT on tasty and tasteless food to test TMS interaction with food evaluation. Moreover, IATs assessing self-related concepts and attitude towards flowers and insects were carried out to control whether TMS could also affect self-representation or, more in general, the cognitive mechanisms required by the IAT. TMS was applied over mPFC; the left parietal cortex (lPA) was also stimulated as control site. Results revealed that mPFC-TMS selectively affected IAT on food, increasing implicit preference for tasty than tasteless food, only in a subgroup of participants who did not show extreme explicit evaluation for tasty and tasteless food. This demonstrates that mPFC has a critical causal role in monitoring food preference and highlights the relevance of considering individual differences in studying food representation and neural mechanisms associated with eating behaviour.

Keywords: Food evaluation; IAT; Inhibition; Medial prefrontal cortex; TMS.