Ihssen, N. and Sokunbi, M. O. and Lawrence, A. D. and Lawrence, N. S. and Linden, D. E. J. (2016) 'Neurofeedback of visual food cue reactivity : a potential avenue to alter incentive sensitization and craving.', Brain imaging and behavior., 11 (3). pp. 915-924.
Abstract
FMRI-based neurofeedback transforms functional brain activation in real-time into sensory stimuli that participants can use to self-regulate brain responses, which can aid the modification of mental states and behavior. Emerging evidence supports the clinical utility of neurofeedback-guided up-regulation of hypoactive networks. In contrast, down-regulation of hyperactive neural circuits appears more difficult to achieve. There are conditions though, in which down-regulation would be clinically useful, including dysfunctional motivational states elicited by salient reward cues, such as food or drug craving. In this proof-of-concept study, 10 healthy females (mean age = 21.40 years, mean BMI = 23.53) who had fasted for 4 h underwent a novel ‘motivational neurofeedback’ training in which they learned to down-regulate brain activation during exposure to appetitive food pictures. FMRI feedback was given from individually determined target areas and through decreases/increases in food picture size, thus providing salient motivational consequences in terms of cue approach/avoidance. Our preliminary findings suggest that motivational neurofeedback is associated with functionally specific activation decreases in diverse cortical/subcortical regions, including key motivational areas. There was also preliminary evidence for a reduction of hunger after neurofeedback and an association between down-regulation success and the degree of hunger reduction. Decreasing neural cue responses by motivational neurofeedback may provide a useful extension of existing behavioral methods that aim to modulate cue reactivity. Our pilot findings indicate that reduction of neural cue reactivity is not achieved by top-down regulation but arises in a bottom-up manner, possibly through implicit operant shaping of target area activity.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (Advance online version) (1850Kb) |
Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (1841Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-016-9558-x |
Publisher statement: | Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Date accepted: | 09 May 2016 |
Date deposited: | 23 June 2016 |
Date of first online publication: | 27 May 2016 |
Date first made open access: | No date available |
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