That a price tag moves what people say about a wine is old news, and so is the finding that it moves the brain signal too. What stayed unexplained is the step in between: how an expectation gets converted into an actual sensation of pleasantness. So participants tasted identical wines labeled with different prices inside a scanner, and the authors traced the route rather than the outcome. Where does the conversion happen?
The route runs through the valuation system. A whole-brain analysis put the , working with the , at the center of translating a into a taste pleasantness rating. And the effect was not uniform across people. How sensitive someone’s valuation system was to money in a setting with nothing to do with taste moderated how strongly the price changed the flavor.
Price changes what people say about wine, and it changes the neural response too. Both of those were established before this study. The gap was mechanical: an expectation is a piece of information, a pleasant taste is a sensation, and nothing in the earlier work explained how the first becomes the second.
Healthy participants tasted identical wines cued with different prices while being scanned. Because the wine never varied, every difference in reported pleasantness had to originate in the number on the label, which is what lets a mediation analysis ask where in the brain the conversion takes place.
The brain’s valuation system, acting in concert with the anterior prefrontal cortex, played the key role in implementing the effect of the price cue on pleasantness ratings. The pairing is the interesting part: a value system plus a region associated with regulating affect, rather than taste areas being overwritten.
People also differed from one another. How sensitive an individual’s valuation system was to monetary rewards outside the taste domain moderated how strongly price cues moved their experience. The authors read the whole result as evidence that pathways for motivation and affective regulation are fundamental to how information shapes sensation. Weigh the method as well: a small healthy sample, a laboratory sip, and a path inferred statistically rather than by intervening anywhere in it.
wat. The same wine tasted better at a higher price, and the size of the illusion depended on how much a person’s brain cared about money generally.
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It moves the question from whether expectation changes experience to how. Finding motivation and affective regulation circuitry in the path suggests the price is not fooling your report. It is recruiting the machinery that assigns value.
How do we know?
Schmidt and colleagues scanned healthy participants tasting identical wines cued with different prices, and used a whole-brain multilevel mediation approach to trace how the cue reached the pleasantness ratings.
What is still unknown
A small sample of healthy volunteers, mediation inferred statistically rather than by intervening anywhere, and a laboratory sip is a long way from a bottle chosen in a restaurant.
Learn something?
Where to next
Can a colored light on a screen change how much a shock hurts?expectation
Why is a wholly predictable song boring, and a wholly surprising one exhausting?expectation
What happened to a share after more people searched for it online?price