Attentional Biases in Self-Control Are Associated with Reward Cue-Related Brain Activity

Successfully resolving self-control conflicts requires individuals to integrate information about the hedonic value of a temptation with its impact on distant goals. Functional neuroimaging research demonstrates that cue-related activity in the brain's reward system predicts self-control failures ranging from weight gain and drug use to gambling disorders. Despite this work, it remains unclear what components of the decision-making process are associated with neural cue-reactivity. The present study integrates eye-tracking and computational modeling of food choices using the attentional Drift Diffusion Model with neural measures of food cue-reactivity in a sample of chronic dieters. Our results show that activity to tempting food cues in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex is associated with an attentional bias towards unhealthy food items during a food choice task. Moreover, functional and structural connectivity between the brain's reward system and a prefrontal region implicated in response inhibition, were associated with a reduction in the drift rate for unhealthy food items and with the ability to maintain healthy items in mind even when gaze is directed towards unhealthy food items. Together, these findings help elucidate the relationship between neural cue-reactivity and dietary decision-making and suggest attentional biases as one mechanism through which cue-reactivity is associated with self-control failure.