Linking Individual Differences in Motivational and Executive Control Neurocognition to Real World Craving and Snacking Behavior: The Case of Restrained and Unrestrained Eaters

Recent neuroscience research has generated detailed models of brain circuits involved in reward processing, decision-making, and self-control to understand may motivated behaviors, including eating (Dagher, 2012). However, research thus far has typically considered neurocognition components, one at a time (Vainik, Dagher, Dubé, & Fellows, 2013), divorced from the complexity of brain and real-life environment (Hammond et al., 2012). Thus, it is important to bridge the current knowledge of brain from neuroscience lab to real-world eating, sparking the transformation in individual behaviors, marketing practices, and public health policy (Dubé et al., 2008); Lab measurements of individual neurocognition should be empirically linked with field observations of eating to explore: which neurocognitive components are engaged in real-life eating; and how individual differences in neurocognition are related to eating as responses to internal (e.g., hunger or craving) and external cues (food cues).