Carnegie Mellon University researchers propose framework to identify food selectivity origins in the brain
Carnegie Mellon University
image:
CMU researchers have identified a region in the brain's visual cortex that responds to food and have developed a theoretical framework that could explain the origins of this selectivity.
view moreCredit: Carnegie Mellon University
Human evolution has revolved around food, from identifying and foraging for it to growing and preparing it. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have identified a region in the brain's visual cortex that responds to food and have developed a theoretical framework that could explain the origins of this selectivity.
"It's crazy how many different aspects of life food touches and how many different factors might contribute to creating any particular category of food," said Leila Wehbe, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department and CMU's Neuroscience Institute. "If you think about it, food is even more primal than social cognition. If you don't have food, you die. It's necessary for survival in all species. Even the ones that don't have that much social interaction need food. And so, I like to think of it as the brain has evolved to either help you find food or keep you from being food."
Wehbe was part of a team that recently published a paper in Trends in Neurosciences that outlines how visual and nonvisual signals contribute to the brain's cortical responses when people were shown images of food. Team members include Michael Tarr, the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Cognitive and Brain Science in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Institute; and Maggie Henderson, an assistant professor in the Psychology Department and the Neuroscience Institute.
Tarr said there are regions of the brain that show some specialization for behaviorally critical domains, such as processing images of faces or tools. Until recently, researchers hadn't identified a similar region involved in processing images of food.
Recent studies using the Natural Scenes Dataset, however, have identified a food region in the brain. The Natural Scenes Dataset is a large-scale fMRI dataset comprising scans taken of people's brains while they were looking at images of objects, such as food, in their natural context or environment — like dishes at a buffet, or a hot dog and soda at a picnic table. The dataset's growth has made research into the brain's food region possible.
"In the past, standard approaches tended to average across participants, which obscured more nuanced findings," Tarr said. "Large, naturalistic data allowed us to better study individual participants, which, in turn, revealed a pattern of food specialization present in every subject."
Researchers also found that images of food in context elicited additional responses in the brain, as compared to images without context. One explanation for this finding is that seeing these objects in their natural context might invoke the varied experiences of interacting with food or other information related to identifying food as just that: food. For example, signals that could influence food selectivity in the visual cortex include color, social cues or the motor actions of eating.
Henderson said while this work examined food selectivity in the brain's visual system, the scope isn't limited to food.
"This finding of food selectivity reveals general principles of high-level information processing in the brain," Henderson said. "How far can we get by thinking about the visual statistics of the environment, and how does that interact with other brain systems, like reward circuitry, social cognition and action recognition? We can think of food as one particular case study for how a range of visual and nonvisual factors might interact to give rise to how the brain is ultimately organized."
For researchers, this work provides a framework to answer open questions about how visual and nonvisual factors influence the brain's network for processing any ecologically critical domain. Learn more about their research in the Trends in Neurosciences paper.
Journal
Trends in Neurosciences
Article Title
Origins of food selectivity in human visual cortex
Successful mobile phone intervention for eating disorders on college campuses will expand
University of Kansas
image:
Kelsie Forbush, who leads the BEST-U intervention, has been conducting research and treatment in the field of eating disorders since 2000.
view moreCredit: University of Kansas
LAWRENCE — Eating disorders are the most common mental health concern on college campuses, yet there is a serious shortage of treatment providers on campuses. A new program leveraging the phone to increase treatment access for college students experiencing eating disorders is expanding after a pilot program’s positive results at the University of Kansas where most participants saw recovery.
The timing couldn’t be better. In the few years since the COVID-19 pandemic, eating disorder prevalence has increased by 62% in university women and 140% in university men, according to the KU researchers, citing a Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services study. But with a shortage of practical and affordable treatments for many of these students, the team behind BEST-U hopes to fill gaps in eating disorder treatment accessibility for universities across the country.
The BEST-U program, an 11-week treatment underpinned by guided self-help cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), has shown “most participants were fully recovered from their eating disorder” at KU, according to researcher Kelsie Forbush, professor of clinical child psychology at KU and co-principal investigator of a new $715,516 grant from the National Institutes of Health to expand the program to train non-mental health care professionals within student health settings to deliver the treatment.
Her co-principal investigator is Kara Christensen-Pacella, an assistant professor from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, who was previously a researcher and therapist on the pilot trial. The expanded study will take place at both KU and UNLV.
“We were inspired to create BEST-U because we saw a high demand for eating disorder treatment but very few resources in our community,” said Forbush, who also serves as a senior scientist with KU’s Life Span Institute and director of its newly founded Center for the Advancement of Research on Eating Behaviors (CARE). “In many cases, KU students had to drive to Kansas City for treatment, but some didn’t have a car. It was also very cost-prohibitive because most area providers did not take insurance.”
Forbush and her colleagues wanted to address the problem after seeing the obvious effect on students. First, they looked at the scope of the issue and found “incredibly” high rates of eating disorders on KU’s campus, matching national data. Then, they explored models that could expand access to intervention while remaining effective.
Forbush’s main collaborator was Sara Gould of Children's Mercy Hospital-Kansas City, where she directs the eating disorder center and is a full-time clinician. Other key collaborators include KU faculty member Alesha Doan, who will lead qualitative aims and analyses to determine how to best scale the program to other colleges across the United States, and Angeline Bottera, who is the associate director of CARE.
“Together, we created an 11-week intervention using a mobile health app,” Forbush said. “Students spend about 10 minutes per week on the app, which is highly interactive, and they also receive 25 to 30 minutes of telehealth coaching from a trained graduate student. By the end of the 11 weeks, most participants were recovered from their eating disorder.”
Besides pairing participants with a trained BEST-U coach, the BEST-U interface includes videos, interactive quizzes, short questions and surveys to track progress each week.
Forbush will partner closely with Watkins Health Services by training their providers to serve as coaches, which will help expand the reach of the intervention to colleges that do not have trained mental health eating-disorder providers. Forbush is also conducting an additional clinical trial of BEST-U to identify if some clients can recover without receiving coaching sessions and who may need additional support.
“We were very excited about the results of our pilot trials and received great feedback,” Forbush said. “One of my favorite stories is about a new coordinator I hired to help run the study. She and her mom were shopping, and the cashier overheard their conversation. When the cashier realized our coordinator was working on the BEST-U study, the cashier said, ‘I participated in that study, and it changed my life.’”
Forbush’s other projects have included addressing eating disorders in the military and developing digital health tools for teens suffering from anorexia nervosa.
The CARE Center, formerly a lab, was established in recent months as a fully fledged research center under the Life Span Institute. CARE conducts research to better identify people with eating disorders for early screening, intervention and treatment-progress monitoring. The center’s mission is “to improve the way eating disorders are assessed, diagnosed and treated through cutting-edge methods and research.” CARE then applies findings to clinical settings with university students.
“The peak age of onset for eating disorders is usually late adolescence to early adulthood,” Forbush said. “So, we're reaching people right in that peak window — when an eating disorder often starts or when they may have already had it for a few years before coming to college. That can be a good time to seek treatment. Sometimes people notice their eating disorder symptoms getting worse as they transition to college.”
It's this work with university students Forbush cited as the most rewarding part of her research and clinical studies. Forbush said expanding the BEST-U program that has succeeded so well at KU makes her “very excited” because it means changing more lives for the better.
“It feels so rewarding to have identified a need — there's a gap, and students need this service — and then to be able to help start filling that gap has felt amazing,” she said. “When you have an eating disorder in college, you really do miss out on a lot of the developmental experiences of becoming an adult — things like making friends and fully engaging in your classes — and you don't get those years back. If we can help a student overcome an eating disorder and get back on track with the developmental trajectory of early adulthood, that’s extremely important. And that's very rewarding.”
No comments:
Post a Comment