Neural Correlates Underlying Social-Cue-Induced Value Change

As humans are social beings, human behavior and cognition are fundamentally shaped by information provided by peers, making human subjective value for rewards prone to be manipulated by perceived social information. Even subtle nonverbal social information, such as others' eye gazes, can influence value assignment, such as food value. In this study, we investigate the neural underpinnings of how gaze cues modify participants' food value (both genders) by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. During the gaze-cuing task, food items were repeatedly presented either while others looked at them or while they were ignored by others. We determined participants' food values by assessing their willingness to pay before and after a standard gaze-cuing training. Results revealed that participants were willing to pay significantly more for food items that were attended to by others compared with the unattended to food items. Neural data showed that differences in subjective values between the two conditions were accompanied by enhanced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and caudate after food items were attended to. Furthermore, the functional connectivity between the caudate and the angular gyrus precisely predicted the individual differences in the preference shift. Our results unveil the key neural mechanism underlying the influence of social cues on the subjective value of food and highlight the crucial role of social context in shaping subjective value for food rewards in human.