When we look at food, our minds move faster than our mouths. In a fraction of a second, the brain begins to register what the food is, how it might taste, whether it is good for us, and how familiar it feels. A new study in Appetite traces that split-second choice, showing that the brain encodes many food qualities in parallel rather than in a strict sequence. This may explain why our choices can feel both immediate and complicated.
The brain activity of 110 adults was measured using electroencephalography, or EEG, while they viewed pictures of 120 foods. Each image stayed on the screen for two seconds. Questions appeared after the picture: “Healthy?”; “Tasty?”; or “Like to eat?” Separately, a larger online group of 421 people rated the same pictures on 12 attributes. These included nutritive properties such as healthiness, calories, edibility, and level of transformation. They included hedonic properties, such as tastiness, willingness to eat, positive and negative feelings, and arousal. They also included familiarity measures such as exposure, recognizability, and typicality.
The structure of brain signals was compared to the structure of these ratings using representational similarity analysis: whether foods that look similar to each other in the ratings also produce similar patterns across EEG sensors at each moment in time.
What the Mind Notices First
Around 200 milliseconds after the picture appears, brain patterns correlate with many attributes. Later, from about 400 to 650 milliseconds, the correlations return and stay elevated. This shape appears across qualities as different as calories, healthiness, positive and negative feelings, and familiarity. Tastiness and willingness to eat tend to show their strongest links in the later window.
Some attributes contribute uniquely even after accounting for all the others. Healthiness, calories, and level of transformation each explain distinct variance in early signals. Negative feelings and arousal also add unique information, as does recognizability, which peaks early and then persists. These results suggest that early attention and later appraisal both matter for food, and that multiple systems carry their share of the work.
An analysis of the ratings revealed two major dimensions that together explained 85 percent of the variation in their judgments. The first gathers tastiness, willingness to eat, positive feelings, and familiarity: the appetizing dimension. The second gathers calories, level of transformation, arousal, and is inversely related to healthiness: the processed dimension.
Both themes appear in brain activity. The appetizing theme shows an early blip near 200 milliseconds and a later sustained rise. The processed theme emerges early and remains steady through the measured window. This pattern hints that the brain can register a global feeling of appeal while also tracking how rich, refined, or wholesome a food might be.
Lessons From a Hungry Brain
Healthiness, calories, and processing all appear quickly, alongside emotion and familiarity. The speed of these signals helps explain why people can both crave and critique a food in the same glance. It also suggests that changing the foods we choose may depend not only on knowledge but also on the early moments of attention that tip the scales toward one attribute or another.
Familiarity is often overlooked in nutrition science, yet here it behaves much like emotion. Exposure, recognizability, and typicality all show the same early-then-sustained pattern as positive and negative feelings. Recognizability, in particular, explains unique variance. What we know well draws attention quickly and can make foods seem safer, tastier, or more acceptable, independent of their nutritional value.
If early attention helps set the table for choice, practical steps follow. Packaging, presentation, and context can nudge which attributes the brain highlights first. Public health efforts that make healthy foods more recognizable and typical within a culture may shift early signals toward the appetizing theme for better options. Education that builds intuitive knowledge about processing and calories could speed recognition of those cues as well.
In the time it takes to blink, the brain surveys many aspects of a food. It gauges appeal, remembers past encounters, and senses richness and refinement. These processes begin together, not one after the other. Understanding that swift, parallel appraisal opens the door to better strategies for eating well, not by fighting desire, but by guiding what the mind notices first.