Eating behavior is influenced by automatic responses to contextual food cues 1. For example, the easy availability of tasty foods can stimulate eating behaviors by enhancing the reward experience. Such working hypothesis is supported by a previous study demonstrated that providing choice resulted in higher levels of both food liking and food intake compared to situations where individuals were randomly assigned a dessert option 2. To address this issue, we conducted a study involving human participants who were asked to assess the pleasantness of sweet commercial beverages in both repeated free-choice and forced-choice conditions. Participants judged pleasantness after drinking sweet commercial beverages in repeated free-and forced-choice conditions. High-resolution fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis techniques 3,4 were employed to examine how choice influenced the spatial patterns that encode categorical information related to the drinks (taste/flavor, likings). By utilizing actual tasteful stimuli instead of relying on food images 5 , our results point at population-level several significant modulations of cortical representations due to choice.