Seminar by Dr. Raffaella Ida Rumiati

SISSA, Trieste (Italy)

Food Visual Recognition in Man

Food is the fuel of life. Natural selection provided Homo sapiens with the adaptive attitude to virtually eat almost everything. Especially in well-to-do countries, being omnivores and the excessive availability of food generate anxiety when decisions about what to eat need to be made. Even though the different senses enrich our food experience, just looking at food allows us to extract a great deal of information about the intrinsic characteristics of food. In my presentation I will review the evidence concerning how we process the information about the calorie content, the level of transformation, and the colour of food. I will also address how food concepts are represented in the brain of healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients. Results will be discussed within a model of semantics.