Incidental learning,attention, and curiosity in squirrel monkeys calorie deprived as infants

The long-term effects of infantile malnutrition on information processing were studied in squirrel monkeys. From 2 through 8 weeks of age, four low-calorie infants were fed reduced amounts of a high protein diet, limiting their mean body weight gain to 23% of that of four well-fed controls, with all of this gain occurring during the first 2 weeks on the low-calorie diet. Thereafter, both groups received the standard diet ad libitum. At 68 weeks of age, incidental learning was tested by introducing shape cues that were redundant to the solution of a previously learned, two-choice, color discrimination. Removal of the color cues showed that the low-calorie monkeys had learned significantly less about the shape cues than had the controls. The basis for this incidental learning failure was then examined with an embedded-figures dicrimination, to measure attentional ability, and a novel stimulus substitution task, to measure curiosity. The groups did not differ in detecting embedded figures, but the low-calorie monkeys were significantly less likely than controls to select or handle novel stimuli that had been substituted for previously learned discriminative cues. It was concluded that undernutrition in infancy may induce a long-term strategy of only learning information which leads to an immediate reward, while suppressing the acquisition of information due to intrinsic curiosity.     

中国人限制性饮食和食物渴求的认知神经机制

物质丰富的时代, 如何抵御美味食物线索带来的食物渴求, 并限制饮食从而保持健康成为人们关注的重要话题之一。近年来, 国内学者为了探讨节食成功的原因, 创建中国食物图片库, 考察限制性饮食的认知神经机制, 以及成功和失败限制性饮食者的脑机制差异; 开展了特质食物渴求及中国特色的辣食渴求的认知神经研究。对推进饮食行为研究的理论发展, 也为肥胖、饮食失调等健康干预工作提供重要支持。     

Differential association between food craving,food addiction and eating-related characteristics in persons at risk for eating disorders

IntroductionFood craving is a key feature of eating disorders, but its association with medical and psychological outcome might depend on the type of eating disorder.ObjectivesThis study investigated the factors associated with food craving in individuals at risk for DSM-5 eating disorder.MethodSeventy-six women were recruited from a non-clinical population (n = 372) based on their positive screening (EDDS, QEWP-R) for binge eating disorder (BED; n = 29), anorexia nervosa (AN; n = 28) or bulimia nervosa (BN; n = 19). They completed self-administered questionnaires assessing food craving (FCQ- T-r), Body Mass Index (BMI), eating behaviour (DEBQ), food addiction (YFAS 2.0), and anxiety and depressive symptoms (HADS).ResultsIndividuals at risk for BED or BN had higher food craving than those at risk for AN. Food craving was associated with BMI only in the BED group. Food craving was positively correlated with external eating in all groups, and with emotional eating in the AN and BED groups and correlated with anxiety only in BN. Food addiction prevalence was higher in the BN group than in the AN or BED groups (respectively 94.7%, 46.4% and 65.5%; p < 0.01). In this non-clinical population, we demonstrated that food craving was differentially associated with BMI and eating-related characteristics according to the type of eating disorder.ConclusionThis suggests that food craving is a transdiagnostic dimension that should be differentially targeted depending on the type of eating disorder; future studies should test this hypothesis in clinical populations.     

Explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activity in childhood obesity

This study investigated differences in the explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activities between children with obesity (n=38) and a matched control group (n=38). The implicit attitude was assessed using the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; J. Exp. Psychol. (50) (2003) 77), a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; J. Personality Social Psychol. (74) (1999) 1464). It was expected that both groups would report a positive explicit attitude towards healthy food and intense physical activities, and a negative explicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities. Of particular interest was the hypothesis that children with obesity would have a more positive implicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities than the control group. Results revealed no differences between groups in the explicit attitude towards food and physical activity. Children and adolescents with obesity had a more pronounced positive implicit attitude towards food in general. The relevance of these findings in terms of prevention, treatment and further research is discussed.     

The effect of food toppings on calorie estimation and consumption

In this research we examine the effect of adding a food topping to the base food on consumers' calorie estimation and consumption of the augmented food (base food plus topping). We show that consumers underestimate the calorie content of augmented food with an unhealthy base, especially when the topping is healthy. However, consumers are less likely to underestimate the calorie content of augmented food with a healthy base, regardless of whether the topping is healthy or unhealthy. Further, we show that adding a healthy topping to an unhealthy base makes consumers not only underestimate the calorie content but also eat more of the augmented food.     

The need for public policies to promote healthier food consumption: A comment on Wansink and Chandon (2014)

Current approaches to addressing obesity have fallen short. This is largely due to the many environmental forces that undermine people's self-regulatory capacity to be personally responsible for their food choices. Novel insights from the social sciences are needed to inform voluntary, health-promoting actions by companies, institutions, and citizens as well as the design of public health policies. Voluntary interventions that rely on nudges should complement traditional public health strategies such as taxation and restriction of child-targeted marketing in schools. In this commentary, we discuss four food policy issues that would benefit from consumer psychology research: (a) the restriction of food marketing to children, (b) provision of nutrition information through food labels, (c) improving school food environments, and (d) placing limits on portion sizes. Identifying effective solutions for obesity will require approaches that integrate psychological, public health, and legal perspectives and methods.     

Models,monitoring, and the mind: Comments on Wansink and Chandon's “Slim by Design”

Wansink and Chandon have examined the “mindlessness” that is often evident in everyday food intake. In this commentary, we focus on four issues raised by Wansink and Chandon's paper: (1) the distinction between food choice and food intake; (2) their model of food intake (and how it compares and contrasts with our own model of food intake); (3) the role of monitoring in the control of food intake; and (4) the meaning of “mindless” eating. In each case we find value in Wansink and Chandon's proposals but also an opportunity for further analysis and refinement.     

Content Hungry: How the Nutrition of Food Media Influences Social Media Engagement

What motivates people to consume and engage with food media on social networks? We adopt an evolutionary lens to suggest that the valence of people’s affective state varies by the implied caloric density of food media, which has a direct impact on social media engagement. First, we analyze a catalog of Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos based on nutritional content derived from the dish’s ingredients and find that visualizing caloric density (i.e., calories per serving) positively influences likes, comments, and shares on Facebook. We then replicate this phenomenon in an experiment, providing preliminary evidence for the role of affect as an explanatory mechanism. We conclude by isolating the role of affect with a classic misattribution task, which attenuates the elevated engagement resulting from exposure to calorie-dense food media. These findings contribute to the dialogue on the antecedents of social media engagement and offer implications for content developers, advertisers, consumer health advocates, and policymakers.     

Visuospatial tasks suppress craving for cigarettes

The Elaborated Intrusion (EI) theory of desire posits that visual imagery plays a key role in craving. We report a series of experiments testing this hypothesis in a drug addiction context. Experiment 1 showed that a mental visual imagery task with neutral content reduced cigarette craving in abstaining smokers, but that an equivalent auditory task did not. The effect of visual imagery was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed comparable effects of non-imagery visual working memory interference. Experiment 3 showed that the benefit of visual over auditory interference was not dependent upon imagery being used to induce craving. Experiment 4 compared a visuomotor task, making shapes from modeling clay, with a verbal task (counting back from 100), and again showed a benefit of the visual over the non-visual task.We conclude that visual imagery supports craving for cigarettes. Competing imagery or visual working memory tasks may help tackle craving in smokers trying to quit.     

“We will work for you” – Social influence may suppress individual food preferences in a communicative situation in dogs

The level of motivation (i.e. incentive power) is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting performance and learning in various tasks. We investigated whether reward quality has an effect on the performance of family dogs in a two-way object choice test in which they can find the hidden food by relying on distal momentary human pointing cues. In three experiments we varied (1) the type of food reward according to the subjects’ own preference; (2) the quality of the reward offered at the same time in the indicated and not-indicated locations; and (3) the order of the high or low quality rewards in consecutive sessions. In Experiment 1, we first tested whether dogs prefer one kind of reward over another. Then one group was tested with the ‘preferred’ food as reward in the indicated bowl, while dogs in the other group received the ‘non-preferred’ food as reward. We did not find any difference between the performance and choice latencies of the two groups. In Experiment 2 for the first group, the indicated bowl contained a piece of carrot and the not-indicated bowl was empty. In the second group the indicated bowl contained carrot, but the not-indicated bowl contained sausage. According to a preliminary preference test, most dogs prefer sausage over carrot invariably. After 20 trials, the two groups performed surprisingly similarly. There was no difference found between groups in the number of correct choices, incorrect choices and non-choices. However, the comparison between the first and last five trials revealed that subjects who found sausage when they chose the not-indicated bowl (did not follow the pointing) chose the non-indicated bowl significantly more often toward the end of their test session. In Experiment 3, each dog received two sessions with 12 pointing trials in each. For the first session, one group was rewarded with sausage and the other with carrot upon choosing the indicated bowl. In the second session, the indicated bowl contained dry dog food for both groups. We found that correct choices and response latencies did not change over two sessions in the ‘sausage’ group. In the ‘carrot’ group, the dogs chose faster in the second session, but their performance did not improve; in fact, they chose the not-indicated bowl more often than the indicated bowl. As a conclusion, we can say that reward quality had some effect on dogs’ choice behavior in these experiments. The drop in their performance was not drastic, taking into account the general refusal to eat one of the ‘rewards’ (carrot) during the preference tests and also during the test trials. It seems that incentive contrast may play a relatively minor role in dog-human social interactions. Appropriate reward quality can be very important in asocial problem solving tasks, but, when interacting with humans, following human signals may override the effect of changed incentive power.