Conditioned place preferences in humans using virtual reality

•We created a virtual reality conditioned place preference task to use with humans.•A strong place preference exists for a room previously paired with food reward.•Additionally, participants explicitly prefer the room previously paired with food.•These preferences are not evident if participants are not food-restricted.

To extend a standard paradigm of conditioning in nonhumans to humans, we created a virtual reality (VR) conditioned place preference task, with real-life food rewards. Undergraduates were placed into a VR environment consisting of 2 visually distinct rooms. On Day 1, participants underwent 6 pairing sessions in which they were confined into one of the two rooms and explored the VR environment. Room A was paired with real-life M&Ms for 3 sessions, and Room B was paired with no food for 3 sessions. Day 2 was the test day, administered the next day, and participants were given free access to the entire VR environment for 5 min. In experiment 1, participants were food restricted, and we observed that on the test day, participants display a significant conditioned place preference for the VR room previously paired with food (p < 0.001). Additionally, they display a significant explicit preference for the M&M-paired room in a forced-choice of “Which room do you like best?”. In experiment 2, when participants were not food restricted, there was no evidence of a place preference, either implicitly (e.g. dwell time) or explicitly. Hence, we show that we can reliably establish a place preference in humans, but that the preference is contingent on the participants’ hunger state. Future research will examine the extent to which these preferences can be blocked or extinguished as well as whether these preferences are evident using other reinforcers.