Insula function is considered critical for many motivated behaviors, with proposed functions
ranging from attention, behavioral control, emotional regulation, goal-directed and aversion …

The sense of taste is a key component of the sensory machinery, enabling the evaluation of
both the safety as well as forming associations regarding the nutritional value of ingestible …

Background Obesity and related co-morbidities represent a major health challenge
nowadays, with a rapidly increasing incidence worldwide. The gut microbiome has recently …

Reward devaluation adaptively controls reward intake. It remains unclear how cortical
circuits causally encode reward devaluation in healthy and depressed states. Here, we …

The hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are traditionally associated with
regulating memory and executive function, respectively. The contribution of these brain …

Reduced food intake is common to many pathological conditions, such as infection and toxin
exposure. However, cortical circuits that mediate feeding responses to these threats are less …

Background It has been proposed that the γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) plays a key role in
the regulation of food intake and body weight by controlling the excitability, plasticity and the …

Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is an associative learning paradigm, wherein consumption
of an appetitive tastant (eg, saccharin) is paired to the administration of a malaise-inducing …

The female bias in eating disorder prevalence is the largest in all of psychiatry. Binge eating
on palatable food (PF) is a core, maladaptive symptom that cuts across all major types of …

Associative learning allows animals to adapt their behavior in response to environmental
cues. For example, sensory cues associated with food availability can trigger …