| Abstract No.: | A-G1203 |
| Country: | Canada |
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| Title: | THE EFFECT OF EXPOSURE TO FOOD STIMULI ON INHIBITORY CONTROL |
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| Authors/Affiliations: | 2 Christine Stich*; 1 Lesley K. Fellows; 2 Bärbel Knäuper; 3 Laurette Dubé;
1 Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, MNI, McGill University; 2 Department of Psychology, McGill University; 3 Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
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| Content: | Objectives: Inhibitory control is typically conceived of as a general executive ability, and measured experimentally with cognitive tasks such as the ‘go-no go’ paradigm. However, real life situations that require inhibitory control often involve stimuli with powerful motivational effects, such as food. Remarkably, little is known about how such effects interact with executive control at the neural level. Food stimuli are processed differently from neutral stimuli in the brain, presumably partly on the basis of the biological importance of such information. Food cues have incentive salience, and are likely to engage pre-potent approach tendencies on the basis of well-learned reward associations and even habitual motor responses. Here, we examined inhibitory control over responses to food stimuli with a novel go-no go task.
Material and Methods: A novel go/no go task captured the ability to make or to withhold responses to food pictures compared to nature pictures. Measures of interest included response latency on go trials and two signal detection measures calculated from hit and false alarm rates: (1) discrimination ability (d’) indicates how well participants were able to differentiate targets from distracters, and (2) decision bias (C) indicates the tendency to make a response to any stimulus. Performance was compared in blocks that required participants to inhibit their responses to food stimuli and blocks that required participants to inhibit their responses to nature stimuli.
Results: Supporting the idea of faster processing of food stimuli, results from 40 men and 45 women indicate that individuals were faster to respond to food than to nature stimuli (F(1,84) = 38.69, p < .001). Supporting the notion of a prepotent response tendency to food stimuli, participants also showed a higher decision bias towards food (F(1, 84) = 44.67, p < .001). Again speaking to enhanced processing of food stimuli, women also showed better discrimination ability for food than for nature stimuli (F(1,44) = 7.95, p =.007)
Conclusion: Our findings indicate that food stimuli are processed faster than non-food stimuli and that they induce stronger ‘go’ response tendencies. The observed faster orientation towards food than towards non-food stimuli combined with a stronger decision bias for food stimuli provides a starting point for understanding how executive and motivational brain systems interact in controlling eating behaviours. |
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