Nutrition and Behaviour Unit, School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, UK; Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK.
Appetite. 2013 Dec;71:295-300. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2013.08.021. Epub 2013 Sep 8.
Obese and overweight individuals show a marked attentional bias to food cues. Food-related attentional bias may therefore play a causal role in over-eating. To test this possibility, the current study experimentally manipulated attentional bias towards food using a modified version of the visual probe task in which cake-stationery item image pairs were presented for 500 ms each. Participants (N=60) were either trained to attend to images of cake, trained to avoid images of cake, or assigned to a no-training control group. Hunger was measured before and after the training. Post-training, participants were given the opportunity to consume cake as well as a non-target food (crisps) that was not included in the training. There was weak evidence of an increase in attentional bias towards cake in the attend group only. We found no selective effects of the training on hunger or food intake, and little evidence for any gender differences. Our study suggests that attentional bias for food is particularly ingrained and difficult to modify. It also represents a first step towards elucidating the potential functional significance of food-related attentional biases and the lack of behavioural effects is broadly consistent with single-session attentional training studies from the addiction literature. An alternative hypothesis, that attentional bias represents a noncausal proxy for the motivational impact of appetitive stimuli, is considered.
肥胖和超重个体对食物线索表现出明显的注意力偏向。因此，与食物相关的注意力偏向可能在暴饮暴食中起因果作用。为了检验这种可能性，本研究使用视觉探测任务的修改版来实验性地操纵对食物的注意力偏向，其中蛋糕-文具项目图像对呈现 500 毫秒。参与者（N=60）要么接受训练以注意蛋糕的图像，要么接受训练以避免注意蛋糕的图像，要么被分配到无训练对照组。在训练前后测量饥饿感。训练后，参与者有机会食用蛋糕以及未包含在训练中的非目标食物（薯片）。只有在注意组中，对蛋糕的注意力偏向有微弱的增加证据。我们没有发现训练对饥饿感或食物摄入有选择性影响，也几乎没有证据表明存在任何性别差异。我们的研究表明，对食物的注意力偏向特别根深蒂固且难以改变。它也代表了阐明与食物相关的注意力偏向的潜在功能意义的第一步，并且缺乏行为影响与成瘾文献中的单次注意力训练研究基本一致。考虑了另一种假设，即注意力偏向代表对食欲刺激的动机影响的非因果替代物。
