Our study has found a significant correlation between consumption of Aldis products and cerebral activations in areas responsible with processing emotion such as head of the caudate nucleus part of the ventral striatum.
Hence, specific products triggered activations in the brain areas for emotion only for consumers of those specific products and this effect was absent for non-consumers.
So the fMRI was able to make the distinction between real consumers of a product and those who don’t consume that particular product.
As we mentioned in the Introduction, the ventral striatum including the ventral part of the caudate nucleus respond to the occurrence of all types of reward.
A strong activation of this region when seeing food images is a direct indicator of the subsequent behavior to approach the stimulus.
Findings of Delgado, Stenger and Fiez (2004) suggest that changes in motivation are capable of modulating basal ganglia activity, and further support an important role for the caudate nucleus in affective processing.
Being able to estimate the reward value of visual objects is a crucial factor in guiding ones behavioral choices and studies have shown that the involvement of the caudate nucleus in decision making is context-dependent, reward related information being processed in the head of the caudate primarily when the information is relevant to one’s goal.