Modifying food items valuation and weight with gamified executive control training.

Hugo Najberg,Michael Mouthon,Maurizio Rigamonti,Lucas Spierer

doi:10.1098/rsos.191288

Abstract

Recent lines of research suggest that repeated executive control of motor responses to food items modifies their perceived value and in turn their consumption. Cognitive interventions involving the practice of motor control and attentional tasks have thus been advanced as potential approach to improve eating habits. Yet, their efficacy remains debated, notably due to a lack of proper control for the effects of expectations. We examined whether a one-month intervention combining the practice of Go/NoGo and Cue approach training modified the perceived palatability of food items (i.e. decrease in unhealthy and increase in healthy food items' palatability ratings), and in turn participants’ weights. We assessed our hypotheses with a parallel, double-blind, randomized controlled trial. Motivation and adherence to the intervention were maximized by a professional-level gamification of the training tasks. The control intervention differed from the experimental intervention only in the biasing of the stimulus–response mapping rules, enabling to balance expectations between the two groups and thus to conclude on the causal influence of motoric control on items valuation. We found a larger decrease of the unhealthy items' palatability ratings in the experimental (20.6%) than control group (13.1%). However, we did not find any increase of the healthy items’ ratings or weight loss. Overall, the present registered report confirms that the repeated inhibition of motor responses to food cues, together with the development of attentional biases away from these cues, reduces their perceived value.

Highlights

Modifying food items valuation and weight with gamified executive control training Hugo Najberg, Maurizio Rigamonti, Michael Mouthon and Lucas Spierer
We examined whether a one-month intervention combining the practice of Go/NoGo and Cue approach training modified the perceived palatability of food items, and in turn participants’ weights
The main hypothesis advanced to account for the effect of inhibitory control training on eating behaviour [7] suggests that it may reduce unhealthy food consumption by developing ‘inhibition reflexes’ of the motor responses to the targeted items [12,13]

Summary

Introduction

Modifying food items valuation and weight with gamified executive control training Hugo Najberg, Maurizio Rigamonti, Michael Mouthon and Lucas Spierer. Cognitive interventions involving the practice of motor control and attentional tasks have been advanced as potential approach to improve eating habits. We examined whether a one-month intervention combining the practice of Go/NoGo and Cue approach training modified the perceived palatability of food items (i.e. decrease in unhealthy and increase in healthy food items’ palatability ratings), and in turn participants’ weights. In Go/NoGo tasks, participants are instructed to respond as fast as possible to a given category of items and to withhold their responses to another category Such practice acts as motivational conditioning paradigm which eventually automatizes the engagement of inhibition processes via associative learning mechanisms and reduces its perceived value. This mechanism is thought to eventually result in the decrease in the hedonic and motivational value of the NoGo stimuli [15,16,17,18]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion