Consummatory and anticipatory properties (“liking” and “wanting”) of odors are powerful reward cues that guide dietary choices and food consumption. Yet, modality-specific paradigms that explicitly probe differential effects of liking and wanting on reward processing remain scarce. This study addresses this gap by establishing a novel incentive delay paradigm that separates invigorating effects of consummatory and anticipatory reward value of sensory food stimuli across modalities. To establish a behavioral baseline, healthy, sated, female participants (N=38) were presented with non-predictive sensory cues before a reaction task that was either rewarded or unrewarded. These cues were selected from a sensory stimulus battery that dissociated liking and wanting through inclusion of food (liked and wanted) and nonfood (liked, not wanted) stimuli that were presented through either the olfactory or visual modality. A significant reaction time advantage indicated differential reward system activation for rewarded versus nonrewarded trials (p<.001). As expected, this advantage was not further modulated by the anticipatory and consummatory hedonic properties of the non-predictive sensory cue in our sated healthy population. Likewise, no systematic differences between sensory modalities were observed. We predict that hungry study populations with a metabolic need for food intake might differentially show a processing benefit for anticipatory food cues, which would be reflected in more efficient reward network activation for wanted as opposed to merely liked stimuli, and that this effect would be specific to the olfactory modality. Studies that test these hypotheses are currently ongoing. Future work will expand these findings to clinical populations characterized by apetite dysregulation to establish a potential perceptual-motivational basis for differences in reward-seeking behavior.
Funding: VR2022-02239, ERC StG 947886 (JS), VR538-2013-8864 (CB), VR2018-02606 (MG)