Food is special by itself: Neither valence, arousal, food appeal, nor caloric content modulate the attentional bias induced by food images

Abstract

When food cues appear in a visual context, such information is likely to influence eating behavior by enhancing attention for food cues. We investigated whether active but task-irrelevant information could modulate the attentional bias for food stimuli using a novel paradigm in which participants were purposely deceived by being enrolled in a memory experiment. A set of images were first held in working memory and then used as task-irrelevant distractors in a subsequent single target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, allowing us to investigate the attentional blink (AB) effect elicited by those images. In Experiment 1, the results revealed that food images elicited a larger AB effect than nonfood images. In three follow-up experiments, we investigated whether valence or arousal (Experiment 2), food preparation (Experiment 3), or food caloric content (Experiment 4) were factors related to the attentional bias for food. Overall, our results demonstrated that when held in working memory, food images can easily capture attention, even in circumstances in which the information retained in memory is irrelevant to solve the task, as indicated by the strong correlation found between items that were recognized in the RSVP task and the AB effect. Nonetheless, none of the food-related properties we examined were found to be associated with this attentional bias for food.

Keywords: Attentional blink; Food cues; Food properties; Food types; Rapid serial visual presentation task.