Self-Control Replication fMRI (ds002643)

This dataset holds the scans of a preregistered replication of the 2009 fMRI study by Hare and colleagues, which proposed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps people weigh long-term health goals against taste when they choose food. The replication was run in the Netherlands with funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) pilot replication program. The images went public on OpenNeuro as ds002643 in 2022 under CC0, and the results paper appeared in Human Brain Mapping in the same year.

Composition

80 adults, 40 women and 40 men, aged 18 to 43 (mean 24.9) took part. They were recruited at gyms, sports clubs, online fitness groups and on campus, and all reported dieting to lose or keep their weight. The participants table also lists height and weight. Each subject has one session with a T1-weighted scan and four BOLD runs.

Acquisition

Scanning took place on a 3 T Philips Achieva at the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, as the image metadata record. The T1-weighted image has 1 mm isotropic voxels. Functional runs used a gradient-echo EPI with TR 2000 ms, 3 mm isotropic voxels and 36 interleaved slices. In three task runs participants rated 50 foods for healthiness, then for tastiness (order counterbalanced) and finally decided whether to eat each food instead of a reference food. A resting-state run came last. A phase-difference fieldmap is included for 79 subjects.

Annotations

There are no image annotations. Events files give trial timing, the food shown and the response for the three task runs.

Known limitations

• Only 6 of 80 participants met the original three-criterion definition of successful self-control, so the paper used a looser one-criterion grouping (15 versus 65).
• The resting-state data are analysed in a separate paper, not in the replication report.
• One subject has no fieldmap.
• The sample is young, dieting and from one site.