The stronger the memory of a specific food, the more likely we are to choose it, according to the latest study carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Basel (Switzerland) and collected by the journal Neuron .
Remembering some foods more than others (a barbecue with friends, some popcorn with your partner on a movie afternoon …) when deciding what to eat has more to do with our memory than with how attractive that option seems to us .
To reach this conclusion, the researchers conducted an experiment with 30 young people to determine how our memory influences the decisions we make . Thus, they carried out magnetic resonance imaging tests while the participants – quite hungry – had to choose 2 of the 48 snacks presented on a computer screen (among them, chocolate, sweets, chips, or cookies), according to their order of preference. After listing the snacks from 1 to 48 from most attractive to least attractive to them, the volunteers were asked to recall the location of their two chosen foods without already having the computer screen in front of them.
The results revealed that the participants tended to choose the snacks from which they best remembered their location, which did not match even close to the food they had found most attractive. That is, the results they remembered best were the ones they finally chose, regardless of their initial tastes .
The functional magnetic resonance data confirmed that the neural mechanisms at this moment of decision-making showed a significant increase in communication between the hippocampus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex , which plays a key role in the inhibition of emotional responses and in the Decision-making process.
“Our study builds a bridge between two central research fields of psychology, that is, memory and research on decision-making,” says Sebastián Gluth, leader of the study.
