Representational structure of perceived food attributes in human occipitotemporal cortex

Summary: Food perception combines visual appearance with subjective and nutritional knowledge, requiring the brain to represent multiple correlated dimensions of food. Using functional MRI and representational similarity analysis, we examined visual, subjective, and categorical food representations in 25 healthy young women viewing 96 food images during an incidental task. Visual models explained representational structure most strongly in early visual cortex and extended into occipitotemporal regions. Perceived calorie, perceived health, and objective calorie category showed smaller but reliable associations with representational geometry in lateral and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Partial RSA and commonality analyses indicated that these effects were largely shared rather than separable: perceived-calorie structure remained reliable after controlling for visual models, but not after controlling for perceived health, while palatability showed no reliable positive correspondence. Thus, calorie-related representations in occipitotemporal cortex appear to reflect a broader food-property axis rather than an isolated scalar code, linking visual processing with food knowledge.