Updated food reactivity tool explains why we eat what we see

Close your eyes and visualize the following: a decadent piece of chocolate cake, a bouquet of fully bloomed red roses, a juicy peach. Hopefully, these mental images produced some form of positive feeling. But is it possible that, despite the feel-good emotions associated with all of them, our brains react differently to food-specific items?

The answer: yes, and knowing the difference may be more important than you previously thought.

“Our brains are wired to react to the environment around us, but different stimuli produce different responses,” said metabolic disease expert Martin Binks.

Measuring our brain’s response to the food environment is critical for nutrition-related behavioral health and weight management interventions. Food Cue Reactivity (FCR) image banks allow nutrition scientists to determine how exposure to food-related environmental stimuli may impact the brain and, ultimately, eating behavior.

In FCR research, participants are shown a large set of image pairs—half of which are non-food items such as combs, car keys, or baskets of flowers. The other half are food images, like bowls of strawberries, vegetables, hamburgers, or cake.

Researchers measure how reactive an individual’s brain is to food images compared to how their brain reacts to non-food images. For this to be reliable, the non-food and food images must be visually comparable (color, size, shape), and researchers also need to understand the relative appeal of both the objects and the food items; factors ignored in past image banks.

“For the research to be accurate, we need the non-food to be paired with food items that are visually similar, and we must also have pictures that represent a range of appeal ratings (both food and non-food objects). Pizza, for example, may be a high appeal food and a Lamborghini a high appeal object, while broccoli and a set of keys are low appeal. Together, this gives us much more confidence that the brain responses we are seeing are about food,” said Binks, professor and chair of George Mason University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies.

Binks co-developed and tested a novel FCR image bank that offers more precision when measuring the brain’s reactions to food. This new image bank corrects a deficiency in existing FCR image banks—they lack visual consistency and, therefore, are limited in their ability to produce scientifically accurate results.

“We want to measure reactions purely to the food item and minimize responses to irrelevant stimuli as much as possible. The Food Cue Reactivity image bank we have made available makes it so that we can see how the brain ‘lights up’ at the sight of food, without the risk of being influenced by visual distractions that can compromise results,” said Binks.

The image bank developed by Binks is openly accessible for use by scholars across all disciplines seeking to study the food-related brain responses.

The new image bank, developed alongside fellow researcher William R. Quarles, Ph.D., ensures appeal ratings and visual characteristics of images are accounted for. This refined method will improve research to better understand people’s the relationship with food. Binks’ work will inform future nutrition research and interventions.

“This image bank will ultimately make the research more accurate and consistent and save other researchers a lot of time spent developing their own image banks,” said Binks.

“The development and testing of the TTU food cue reactivity image bank” was published in July 2025 in the International Journal of Obesity.