Go/no-go for food: Attention bias and intention to eat unhealthy food

Abstract

Objective: The current research evaluated whether Go/No-go training for highly palatable (HP) food affected attention bias for HP food (an automatic/implicit outcome) and intention to eat unhealthy food (a controlled/explicit outcome). Method: A sample of Australian adults representative for age, gender and Body Mass Index (BMI) (N = 561, Mage = 46.31 years, SD = 16.75, 52.3% women, MBMI = 27.11, SD = 6.34) completed self-report measures of dietary psychological constructs and food image modified Stroop tasks as measures of pre- and post-test attention bias for HP food. After random assignment of participants to two conditions, a Go/No-go intervention was used to train HP food targeted inhibitory control in the experimental group, or general inhibitory control in the control group. All research tasks were delivered online. Results: The experimental, HP food inhibitory control training group reported intention to eat less unhealthy food than the control group, F (1, 637) = 4.81, R² = 0.09, p = .029. Counter to expectations, the experimental group exhibited a heightened attention bias to HP food images after the training, F (1, 637) = 9.48, R² = 0.39, p = .002. Conclusion: Go/No-go training for food may improve both top-down and bottom-up inhibitory control, using both automatic and controlled processes. Further, it may not be effective in lowering attention bias for HP food, but may be effective in lowering unhealthy food intake despite raising attention bias for HP food. Further research that tests these effects using varied reaction time tasks is needed to confirm these results and to explore possible alternative explanations.