A Neurocognitive Model of Anorexia Nervosa

Patients with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) have extreme difficulty changing their eating behavior, even when they express desire for change. These behaviors seem to override all other potential responses, and can appear perseverative, or habitual. The purpose of this study is to investigate thought processes and neural mechanisms that may contribute to the development of habitual behaviors. The investigators hypothesize that patients with AN will perform differently than people without eating disorders on a series of neuropsychological tasks and will show different neural activation patterns in functional neuroimaging scans.