Understanding reward and withdrawal mechanisms underlying habitual caffeine use. PhD studentship funded by SoCoBio DTP (2023-2026)

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug and is also a food additive found in many foods and beverages. To date, research has demonstrated the characteristics of caffeine in terms of its withdrawal effects on mood, cognition and preference, but the more fundamental questions on the neural mechanisms underlying habitual caffeine use and deprivation state remain unknown. This is important to understand as it will reveal how acquiring a liking for caffeine is linked to particular brain pathways (involving adenosine) and thereby contribute to questions of plasticity and addiction. This project uses a combination of behavioural and neural (fMRI) measures to characterise the long-term effects of habitual caffeine consumption and acute withdrawal. The outcomes of this research aim to further our understanding of the basic mechanisms that underly our affinity to consume caffeinated products, with potential impact on policy and product formulation.

Staff: Tatum Sevenoaks (PhD student),  Prof Martin Yeomans (main supervisor)

Collaborators:  Dr Lorenzo Stafford (University of Portsmouth), Prof Richard J Stevenson (University of Macquarie)

Associative mechanisms in human taste preferences. PhD studentship by School of Psychology (2024-2027)

In our lifetime we each acquire a unique profile of food preferences through our interactions with food. We then are guided by visual cues before ingestion whether to accept or reject potential foods. For many years it has been hypothesised that associations between these visual cues and the rewarding effects of ingestion are key to driving food preferences.  A recent PhD studentship at Sussex (Tom Ridley-Siegert) provided some evidence that noverl cues can associate with a rewaridng sweet taste to drive choice and intake. However, his work did not allow us to model the acquisition of cue-taste associations.  In this studentship we will measure responses to novel cues paired with liked and aversive tastes to map out how these associations are acquired using a combinaiton of behavioural and neuroscience techniques.

Staff: Meera Vinu (PhD student, Prof Martin Yeomans (main supervisor), Dr Hans Crombag (co-supervisor)

Collaborators: Dr Ryan Scott (Sussex), Dr Liat Levita (Sussex)

Using smart-glasses to track and manipulate eating in the real world. Innovation grant from UKRI Consumer Lab hub (2024-2025)

Capturing human eating behaviour as it happens in the real world has been the Holy Grail of appetite research for many years: without a way of capturing this, our understanding of eating behaviour combines detailed assessments conducted under tightly controlled laboratoiry conditions and the self-report measures from consumers' everyday eating. Emteq's smart-glasses, which use sensors to detect muscle movements in the face, offer a potential new solution to this problem.  Building on an earlier Accelerated Knowledge Transfer Partnership award, this project test the extent to which we can detect everyday eating in volunteers wearing these smart glasses, testing three key questions: 1. how reliably is eating detected? 2. Can we identify what was eatne from computer analysis of the food taken while eating? and 3. can we use haptic feedback to help consumers adjust their eating?

Staff:  Sophia Cox (RA), Aishwarya Padmanabhan (RA), Prof Martin Yeomans (PI), Dr Rhiannon Armitage (CoI).

Collaborators at Emteq:  Dr Charles Nduka (Founder and Chief Scientific Officer), Assistant Prof Hristijan Gjoresk (data science lead), Simon Stankoski, Filip Panchevski, Claire Baert, Borjan Sazdov, Mia Darkovska, Ivana Kiprijanovska, Mohsen Fatoorechi, Bojan Sofronievski, Elena Indovska, Angela Nikodinovska, Stefani Kulebanova, Andrew Cleal, Martin Gjoreski, Steen Strand