Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland.
PLoS One. 2011;6(5):e19215. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019215. Epub 2011 May 16.
An organism's survival depends crucially on its ability to detect and acquire nutriment. Attention circuits interact with cognitive and motivational systems to facilitate detection of salient sensory events in the environment. Here we show that the human attentional system is tuned to detect food targets among nonfood items. In two visual search experiments participants searched for discrepant food targets embedded in an array of nonfood distracters or vice versa. Detection times were faster when targets were food rather than nonfood items, and the detection advantage for food items showed a significant negative correlation with Body Mass Index (BMI). Also, eye tracking during searching within arrays of visually homogenous food and nonfood targets demonstrated that the BMI-contingent attentional bias was due to rapid capturing of the eyes by food items in individuals with low BMI. However, BMI was not associated with decision times after the discrepant food item was fixated. The results suggest that visual attention is biased towards foods, and that individual differences in energy consumption--as indexed by BMI--are associated with differential attentional effects related to foods. We speculate that such differences may constitute an important risk factor for gaining weight.
生物体的生存能力在很大程度上取决于其检测和获取营养的能力。注意回路与认知和动机系统相互作用，以促进对环境中显著感官事件的检测。在这里，我们表明人类注意系统能够检测到食物目标，而不是非食物项目。在两项视觉搜索实验中，参与者在非食物干扰物的数组中搜索不同的食物目标，或者反之亦然。当目标是食物而不是非食物时，检测时间更快，而食物目标的检测优势与体重指数 (BMI) 呈显著负相关。此外，在搜索视觉同质食物和非食物目标的数组期间进行眼动追踪表明，BMI 相关的注意力偏差是由于在 BMI 较低的个体中，食物项目迅速吸引了眼睛。然而，BMI 与在固定差异食物项目后的决策时间无关。结果表明，视觉注意力偏向于食物，而能量消耗的个体差异——如 BMI 所示——与与食物相关的不同注意力效应有关。我们推测，这种差异可能是体重增加的一个重要风险因素。
