Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Eating Disorders Develop and Persist?
Track where the behavioral and neural measures agree about group differences and where they diverge.
Why you’re reading it. Examine a maintaining-process proposal without equating restrictive behavior, low weight and habit.
A question to consider. What result from an outcome-devaluation study would add information that this food-choice comparison cannot provide?
Why this reading
Similar food choices need not indicate the same psychological process. Foerde and colleagues compare behavioral and neural measures across four groups, including people with restrictive eating difficulties who are not underweight. The study makes it possible to examine where a continuum is informative and where different measures suggest different group patterns.
Before you read
A food-choice task samples decisions under specified conditions; it does not reproduce every influence on everyday eating. A neural correlate accompanies a process but does not uniquely identify it. Habit, in a technical sense, concerns reduced sensitivity to changed outcomes—not simply repetition or a familiar action.
Read for
- Compare how the four groups were defined and whether behavioral and neural results divide them in the same way.
- Follow the relationship between task choices and the later laboratory meal. What does this add to the task’s interpretation?
- Examine the distinction between a proposed habit account and what the study directly manipulated or measured.
Consider afterwards
- What experiment could distinguish an outcome-sensitive choice from a habit when both produce the same observed action?
- How would your interpretation change if a behavioral difference appeared across clinical groups but a neural difference appeared mainly in one?
Editorial context
The study included 110 women aged 18–40 and extends the team’s earlier food-choice study in a new sample. It does not directly test outcome devaluation, so the findings cannot establish habit as the mechanism. Unequal group sizes, selected participants and possible effects of nutritional state limit generalization. The article appeared online in 2020 and in its journal issue in 2022.