Neural responses to food-related stimuli following experimental sleep manipulation: A systematic review of task-based neuroimaging studies.

OBJECTIVE

Adequate sleep is essential for physiological, cognitive, and mental functioning. While epidemiological and behavioral studies show that sleep restriction or sleep deprivation is associated with altered responses to food stimuli, the neural mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. The preregistered systematic review synthesized evidence from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging studies examining neural responses to food-related stimuli following experimental sleep manipulations, including sleep deprivation or sleep restriction.

METHOD: Literature searches were conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and American Psychological Association PsycInfo, yielding 11 eligible studies, including nine with adult samples and two with adolescent samples. We extracted the data, assessed the risk of bias, and conducted a qualitative synthesis.

RESULTS

Across studies with adult samples, six visual food-cue studies generally reported stronger brain activity following sleep deprivation or sleep restriction, particularly in the striatum, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus. Two food valuation studies, including a willingness-to-pay and food-desire task, showed enhanced neural activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus during food valuation. Moreover, one study using a food odor perception paradigm showed that sleep deprivation altered chemosensory and interoceptive processing by enhancing food odor encoding in the piriform cortex. Two adolescent studies reported distinct neural findings.

CONCLUSIONS

Together, these findings highlight that experimentally induced sleep deprivation or sleep restriction does not uniformly enhance reward-related brain activity; rather, it is associated with task-dependent changes in neural responses to food-related stimuli. However, the limited and heterogeneous evidence limits conclusions regarding common neural mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).