Kristjánsson Árni, Helgadóttir Auður, Kristjánsson Tómas
Faculty of Psychology, University of Iceland, Nýi Garður, 101, Reykjavík, Iceland.
School of Psychology, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, 101000, Russia.
J Eat Disord. 2021 Feb 10;9(1):18. doi: 10.1186/s40337-021-00373-0.
Foraging tasks have recently been increasingly used to investigate visual attention. Visual attention can be biased when certain stimuli capture our attention, especially threatening or anxiety-provoking stimuli, but such effects have not been addressed in foraging studies.
We measured potential attentional bias associated with eating disorder symptoms to food related stimuli with our previously developed iPad foraging task. Forty-four participants performed a foraging task where they were instructed to tap predesignated food related targets (healthy and unhealthy) and other non-food objects and completed four self-report questionnaires measuring symptoms of eating disorders. Participants were split into two groups based on their questionnaire scores, a symptom group and no symptom group.
The foraging results suggest that there are differences between the groups on switch costs and target selection times (intertarget times) but they were only statistically significant when extreme-group analyses (EGA) were used. There were also notable food versus non-food category effects in the foraging patterns.
The results suggest that foraging tasks of this sort can be used to assess attentional biases and we also speculate that they may eventually be used to treat them through attention bias modification. Additionally, the category effects that we see between food items and other items are highly interesting and encouraging. At the same time, task sensitivity will need to be improved. Finally, future tests of clinical samples could provide a clearer picture of the effects of eating disorder symptoms on foraging for food.
觅食任务最近越来越多地被用于研究视觉注意力。当某些刺激吸引我们的注意力时，尤其是威胁性或引发焦虑的刺激，视觉注意力可能会产生偏差，但此类影响在觅食研究中尚未得到探讨。
我们使用之前开发的iPad觅食任务，测量与饮食失调症状相关的对食物相关刺激的潜在注意力偏差。44名参与者执行了一项觅食任务，他们被指示点击预先指定的食物相关目标（健康和不健康的）以及其他非食物对象，并完成了四份测量饮食失调症状的自我报告问卷。参与者根据问卷得分被分为两组，症状组和无症状组。
觅食结果表明，两组在转换成本和目标选择时间（目标间时间）上存在差异，但只有在使用极端组分析（EGA）时，这些差异才具有统计学意义。在觅食模式中，食物与非食物类别效应也很显著。
结果表明，此类觅食任务可用于评估注意力偏差，我们还推测它们最终可能通过注意力偏差修正来治疗注意力偏差。此外，我们在食物项目和其他项目之间看到的类别效应非常有趣且令人鼓舞。同时，任务敏感性需要提高。最后，对临床样本的未来测试可以更清楚地了解饮食失调症状对觅食行为的影响。
