Abstract
Attentional bias has been consistently investigated with both threatening and rewarding stimuli, such as food. Several studies demonstrated the presence of an attentional bias for high-calorie food cues compared to neutral (non-food) cues. Authors have interpreted this effect in the context of top-down processes (e.g. the food draws attention thanks to the experience we have with it). The aim of the present study is to test whether perceptual features (bottom-up processes) can modulate the attentional bias effect of food stimuli. Using a dot-probe task, we investigated the relevance of colours in the occurrence of the attentional bias. We compared two different categories of naturalistic food images (high-calorie versus low-calorie) both coloured (Exp. 1) and greyscale (Exp. 2). While we found the occurrence of the attentional bias with high-calorie food coloured images, we did not obtain any significant differences with greyscale images. In Experiments 3 and 4, we compared greyscale office items images, respectively, with greyscale high-calorie food images (Exp. 3) and greyscale low-calorie food images (Exp. 4). In both these last experiments, we did not find any attentional bias. Thus, taken together, our results show that colours convey crucial identity information that could orient our attention. We interpret these results as linked to the relevance of visual appearance in our experience of food.
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Notes
For replication purposes, a list of the used photographs can be obtained from the corresponding author.
In order to check the recognizability of food images in their greyscale version (as used in Exps. 2–4) with an exposure of 500 ms we ran an additional experiment. Eleven participants reporting normal or corrected-to-normal vision took part in the experiment voluntarily (5 males; mean age = 35.09 years; SD = 5.19; range 25–43 years). Stimulus presentation, pseudo-randomization and the recording of responses were all controlled by a custom-made script in the PsychoPy (v 3.6.1) programming environment, carried out with online administration using Pavlovia.org (Peirce et al. 2019). Stimuli consisted of the same greyscale images used in Experiments 2, 3 and 4. Images were displayed for 500 ms and each picture was equally often presented on the right or left of the screen/fixation cross. After receiving instructions and completing a few practice trials, the participants completed 176 trials. In every trial, a central cross was presented for 2000 ms followed by two simultaneous images, one depicting food and the other depicting an office item. Images appeared equiprobably (50%) on the left or on the right of the fixation cross. After 500 ms images disappeared and a white screen appeared for 1500 ms. Participants’ task was to recognize the image containing food as fast as they could, by pressing the “N” or “M” keys, if it was on the left or right, respectively.
Results show accuracy mean values of 95.04% (SD = 20.22) and reaction times mean values of 488.59 (SD = 88.90) thus suggesting that food images are quickly recognizable even in greyscale and presented for only 500 ms.
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Del Gatto, C., Indraccolo, A., Imperatori, C. et al. Hungry for colours? Attentional bias for food crucially depends on perceptual information. Cogn Process 22, 159–169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-020-00990-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-020-00990-8