You eye what you eat: BMI, consumption patterns, and dieting status predict temporal attentional bias to food-associated images.

People know that overconsumption of high-fat high-sugar (HFHS) foods have negative consequences for physical and cognitive wellbeing but continue to consume these foods in excess, leading to recent proposals to model obesity as an addiction disorder. The current experiment tested, in a large undergraduate sample (N = 306), the hypothesis that obesity and overconsumption is linked with an oversensitivity to rewards that drives attentional biases towards foods and food-associated cues. Using a modified emotion-induced blindness task with food-related distractors, we examined the extent to which attentional biases to images of HFHS foods were accounted for by BMI, HFHS food intake, self-reported hunger, time since last meal, diet status, food preferences, and attentional control. We also examined whether the same individual differences predicted attentional priority to cues that have a learned association with HFHS foods (i.e., images of food logos). Contrary to our predictions, higher BMI predicted less attentional priority for images of food and food logos. At the same time, increased consumption of HFHS foods predicted increased attentional priority for food images, whereas dieting predicted increased attentional priority for food logo images. Our results suggest that different people may preferentially attend to food versus food logo imagery based on their relationships with food. More broadly, our results support the theoretical perspective that attentional biases to food-associated stimuli can be affected by various competing, state-related factors.

Blinded by bodies: Elevated eating disorder symptomatology is associated with increased attentional priority for thin bodies.

Selective processing of female thin-ideal body imagery is associated with greater body dissatisfaction, and eating disorder-specific rumination has been shown to mediate this relationship. Across two studies, we employed a modified rapid serial visual presentation task (similar to that used within the emotion-induced blindness literature), such that participants searched for a task-relevant target that was sometimes preceded by a thin body, non-thin body, or neutral task-irrelevant distractor. Our first experiment (N = 372) revealed a "body-induced blindness" in an unselected female sample, such that bodies in general distracted attention more than neutral images, and non-thin bodies distracted more than thin-ideal bodies. In our second experiment, female participants were selected based on eating disorder symptomatology (N = 114). Females that exhibited elevated eating disorder symptoms were distracted more by thin bodies compared to those low in symptomatology, greater distraction from thin bodies was associated with greater body dissatisfaction, and this relationship was mediated by eating disorder-specific rumination. Altogether, our findings illustrate the persistent nature of attentional distortions that occur early in cognitive processing and across time for those high in eating disorder symptomatology.