The effect of food anticipation on cognitive function: An eye tracking study.

Michelle S Segovia,Rodolfo M Nayga,Marco A Palma,Zhifeng Gao

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0223506

Abstract

By randomizing the order in which participants perform a cognitive test and a food choice task in a controlled experiment, we investigate whether cognitive capacity can be enhanced by the simple act of anticipating food intake. Our findings show that overweight and obese participants exhibit an anticipatory food reward effect, which helped enhance their mental resources and improve their performance in a cognitive test. However, we find no anticipation effect among normal weight participants. Furthermore, eye tracking data reveal that food temptation, in the form of visual attention and emotional arousal is higher for overweight and obese individuals when they are cognitively impaired.

Highlights

Resource scarcity in the form of financial constraints, time pressure, sleep deprivation, and high cognitive load can severely impede cognitive capacity, resulting in suboptimal behavior [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Glucose has been previously linked to metabolic and motivational roles for glucose in performance enhancement, we investigate whether cognitive resources can be replenished by the simple act of anticipating food intake, prior to sensing or consuming actual food
The results of the experiment show that overweight and obese individuals exhibit an anticipatory food reward effect, which helped enhance their mental resources and improve their performance in a cognitive test. These behavioral findings are supported by eye tracking data, which reveal that temptation–in the form of visual attention and emotional arousal–is higher under low cognitive resources

Summary

Introduction

Resource scarcity in the form of financial constraints, time pressure, sleep deprivation, and high cognitive load can severely impede cognitive capacity, resulting in suboptimal behavior [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Lowincome individuals are often preoccupied about financial and budgetary concerns which makes them more likely to take high-interest loans [2], purchase lottery tickets [9], fail to enroll in welfare assistance programs[10], and make shortsighted economic decisions (i.e. be more impatient) [11, 12]. Individuals experiencing conditions of ego depletion and extreme time pressure cooperate less in social dilemma games [16], while the sleep deprived make more risky choices in gambling tasks [17,18,19,20]

Methods

Results

Conclusion