Cognitive Determinants of Dietary Behavior: From Mechanistic Evidence to Behavioral Change

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit your research to the Special Issue, ‘Cognitive Determinants of Dietary Behavior: From Mechanistic Evidence to Behavioral Change.’ Although healthy dietary patterns are linked to improved cognition, growing evidence highlights the reverse pathway of how cognitive processes shape responses to food cues and guide dietary choices. As maintaining a healthy diet remains challenging for many and diet-related health concerns continue to rise, understanding and targeting these cognitive mechanisms may offer an alternate pathway for promoting healthier eating. Despite these possibilities, it is unclear how food-related cognitive mechanisms operate and translate into meaningful, sustained dietary change. These gaps reflect the complexity of cognitive processes influencing eating, the variety of methods used to measure cognition and diet and limited research connecting cognitive mechanisms to food intake, long-term outcomes and dietary interventions. Additionally, little is known about how individual differences, like baseline cognitive functioning, health habits, or food environments, modify cognitive responses to food and responsiveness to cognition-focused dietary interventions. These unanswered questions reflect the need for integrative, multidisciplinary research. While no single Special Issue can address all these gaps, our goal is to showcase original research and reviews that test the role of cognitive mechanisms in dietary behavior, particularly in relation to individual differences and contexts, real-world eating behavior and incorporation into dietary interventions. Given the heterogeneity in this field, we particularly encourage work that showcases methodological rigor and replication.

Dr. Kaylie A. Carbine
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.