Attentional Bias for Food Cues: Differences between Obese and Normal-Weight Individuals (2012)

Undergraduate: Katherine Cullen

Faculty Advisor: Charlotte Boettiger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Obesity is a spreading epidemic across the United States and is especially prevalent in the southeast. A possible contribution to the obesity epidemic may be an increase in the allocation of attention to food leading to an increased consumption. Previous attentional bias research with obese individuals has shown that obese individuals show a significantly greater attentional bias to palatable food cues compared to normal-weight individuals. The purpose of this project was to determine the attentional bias differences between obese individuals (BMI?30) and normal-weight (BMI 18.5-24.9) individuals to palatable food stimuli. To assess differences in attention we recruited 25 usable participants who answered questionnaire measures and completed attentional bias tasks to reveal information about attentional bias to food cues between the two participant groups. We found a significant effect of lag on the attentional blink task, showing that the paradigm was functioning properly; however, there was no difference in performance between groups. Obese participants are demonstrating a deeper blink for food images from lag 2 to lag 8 compared to office images. We also found that at the 500 ms cue display time in the cuing paradigm, a faster reaction time to food images for obese individuals is trending toward significance. Overall, the most salient result is the faster reaction time of obese participants at the 500 ms cue time, which may indicate some voluntary control over attentional allocation.