Humans make decisions about food every day. The visual system provides important information that forms a basis for these food decisions. Although previous research has focused on visual object and category representations in the brain, it is still unclear how visually presented food is encoded by the brain. Here, we investigate the time-course of food representations in the brain. We used time-resolved multivariate analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) data, obtained from human participants (both sexes), to determine which food features are represented in the brain and whether focused attention is needed for this. We recorded EEG while participants engaged in two different tasks. In one task, the stimuli were task relevant, whereas in the other task, the stimuli were not task relevant. Our findings indicate that the brain can differentiate between food and nonfood items from ~112 ms after the stimulus onset. The neural signal at later latencies contained information about food naturalness, how much the food was transformed, as well as the perceived caloric content. This information was present regardless of the task. Information about whether food is immediately ready to eat, however, was only present when the food was task relevant and presented at a slow presentation rate. Furthermore, the recorded brain activity correlated with the behavioral responses in an odd-item-out task. The fast representation of these food features, along with the finding that this information is used to guide food categorization decision-making, suggests that these features are important dimensions along which the representation of foods is organized.

人类每天都会做出有关食物的决定。视觉系统提供重要信息，构成这些食物决策的基础。尽管之前的研究主要集中在大脑中的视觉对象和类别表征，但仍不清楚视觉呈现的食物是如何被大脑编码的。在这里，我们研究了大脑中食物表征的时间过程。我们使用从人类参与者（男女）获得的脑电图（EEG）数据的时间分辨多变量分析来确定大脑中代表了哪些食物特征以及是否需要集中注意力。当参与者从事两项不同的任务时，我们记录了脑电图。在一项任务中，刺激与任务相关，而在另一项任务中，刺激与任务无关。我们的研究结果表明，大脑可以在刺激开始后约 112 毫秒内区分食物和非食物。随后潜伏期的神经信号包含有关食物天然性、食物转化程度以及感知的热量含量的信息。无论任务如何，该信息都会存在。然而，有关食物是否可以立即食用的信息仅在食物与任务相关并且以缓慢的呈现速率呈现时才呈现。此外，记录的大脑活动与奇数项任务中的行为反应相关。这些食物特征的快速表示，以及这些信息用于指导食物分类决策的发现表明，这些特征是组织食物表示的重要维度。