# The Neuroscience of Obesity: Developing Executive Control, Neural Processes, and Obesity Risk

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA LINCOLN · 2022 · $10,984

## Abstract

Project Summary
 Obesity continues to pose a major public health problem, with approximately one-third of children and
adolescents in the U.S. classified as overweight or obese. To combat this crisis, NIH has identified the need for
novel research aimed at explicating modifiable factors that contribute to obesity in order to develop cutting-edge,
evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Informed by theoretical frameworks and methodology
from the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, the proposed project is a response to NIH’s call to action
and is comprised of two related studies aimed at investigating the role of executive control (EC; also known as
“executive functioning”) in obesity etiology. Defined as a set of critical cognitive abilities responsible for directing
attention and other behaviors, EC is a modifiable construct with links to chronic disease risk and health behaviors,
including weight problems. However, the literature examining EC and obesity has yet to fully investigate the
directionality of the EC-obesity association or appetitive EC, a related construct that may characterize a food
specific variant of general EC abilities.
Therefore, Study 1 of the proposed project leverages a combination of previously-collected data as well
as data from an ongoing NIH-funded longitudinal study of adolescents (N=312) to investigate dynamic, reciprocal
associations between EC and body mass index (BMI) across late childhood, pre-adolescence, and adolescence.
Study 2 proposes to investigate individual differences in appetitive EC among adolescents (N=70) using a novel
fMRI food cue task that teaches participants to regulate their responses to palatable foods. These projects
strategically span consecutive developmental periods in order to inform the timing of obesity prevention and
intervention strategies. Specifically, clarifying when EC influences obesity in the course of development will
inform the timing of interventions, while identifying neural treatment targets will inform behavioral (e.g., inhibition
and emotion regulation training) and medical (e.g., screening for neural biomarkers and using personalized
interventions for high-risk individuals) strategies for reducing and preventing obesity.
 The proposed research will take place at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where the applicant
is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology Training Program. The environment at UNL provides state-of-
the-art research facilities (including an MRI facility) and is ideally suited for supporting the candidate’s training
plan, which was carefully designed to provide training in health behavior assessment, biological factors that
contribute to obesity, MRI administration and data analysis, advanced statistical techniques, and grant writing in
order to prepare her for a career as an NIH-funded clinical scientist.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10364764
- **Project number:** 5F31DK122636-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA LINCOLN
- **Principal Investigator:** Cara Celine Tomaso
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $10,984
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-04-01 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10364764

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10364764, The Neuroscience of Obesity: Developing Executive Control, Neural Processes, and Obesity Risk (5F31DK122636-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10364764. Licensed CC0.

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