Sawada Reiko, Sato Wataru, Toichi Motomi, Fushiki Tohru
Department of Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry, Habilitation and Rehabilitation, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto UniversityKyoto, Japan.
Organization for Promotion of Neurodevelopmental Disorder ResearchKyoto, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 22;8:1033. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01033. eCollection 2017.
Rapid detection of food is crucial for the survival of organisms. However, previous visual search studies have reported discrepant results regarding the detection speeds for food vs. non-food items; some experiments showed faster detection of food than non-food, whereas others reported null findings concerning any speed advantage for the detection of food vs. non-food. Moreover, although some previous studies showed that fat content can affect visual attention for food, the effect of fat content on the detection of food remains unclear. To investigate these issues, we measured reaction times (RTs) during a visual search task in which participants with normal weight detected high-fat food (i.e., fast food), low-fat food (i.e., Japanese diet), and non-food (i.e., kitchen utensils) targets within crowds of non-food distractors (i.e., cars). Results showed that RTs for food targets were shorter than those for non-food targets. Moreover, the RTs for high-fat food were shorter than those for low-fat food. These results suggest that food is more rapidly detected than non-food within the environment and that a higher fat content in food facilitates rapid detection.
快速检测食物对生物体的生存至关重要。然而，先前的视觉搜索研究报告了关于食物与非食物项目检测速度的不一致结果；一些实验表明食物的检测速度比非食物快，而另一些实验则报告在食物与非食物检测的速度优势方面没有发现差异。此外，尽管先前的一些研究表明脂肪含量会影响对食物的视觉注意力，但脂肪含量对食物检测的影响仍不清楚。为了研究这些问题，我们在一项视觉搜索任务中测量了反应时间（RTs），在该任务中，体重正常的参与者在非食物干扰物（即汽车）的人群中检测高脂肪食物（即快餐）、低脂肪食物（即日本饮食）和非食物（即厨房用具）目标。结果表明，食物目标的反应时间比非食物目标短。此外，高脂肪食物的反应时间比低脂肪食物短。这些结果表明，在环境中食物比非食物更容易被快速检测到，并且食物中较高的脂肪含量有助于快速检测。
