Is purchasing of vegetable dishes affected by organic or local labels? Empirical evidence from a university canteen.

Previous studies have shown that the use of labels such as "organic" or "local" may improve the perceived healthiness, attractiveness and taste evaluation of healthy food products and increase their likelihood of being purchased. The aim of this work was to examine whether labeling vegetable items could promote consumption of at least one vegetable dish among students in a university canteen. We analyzed the purchasing of vegetable dishes among 458 students during an eight-week intervention in a university canteen, where vegetable items alternatively received neutral, organic and local labels. We implemented a multilevel Bayesian analysis to incorporate prior knowledge extracted from data preceding the experiment and to account for potential confounders related to the design of the experiment. Our results suggest that the labels "organic," "local" "organic & local" were not strongly associated with ordering at least one vegetable plate. Additional studies are warranted to further investigate the potential impact of vegetable plate labeling on customers' purchasing choices.

Hippocampal ensembles represent sequential relationships among an extended sequence of nonspatial events.

The hippocampus is critical to the temporal organization of our experiences. Although this fundamental capacity is conserved across modalities and species, its underlying neuronal mechanisms remain unclear. Here we recorded hippocampal activity as rats remembered an extended sequence of nonspatial events unfolding over several seconds, as in daily life episodes in humans. We then developed statistical machine learning methods to analyze the ensemble activity and discovered forms of sequential organization and coding important for order memory judgments. Specifically, we found that hippocampal ensembles provide significant temporal coding throughout nonspatial event sequences, differentiate distinct types of task-critical information sequentially within events, and exhibit theta-associated reactivation of the sequential relationships among events. We also demonstrate that nonspatial event representations are sequentially organized within individual theta cycles and precess across successive cycles. These findings suggest a fundamental function of the hippocampal network is to encode, preserve, and predict the sequential order of experiences.