food pleasantness affects visual selective attention

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Food pleasantness affects visual selectiveattentionGiuseppe di Pellegrino a , Silvia Magarelli a & Flavia Mengarelli aa Center for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience , University ofBologna , Cesena, ItalyPublished online: 10 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Giuseppe di Pellegrino , Silvia Magarelli & Flavia Mengarelli (2011) Food pleasantnessaffects visual selective attention, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64:3, 560-571, DOI:10.1080/17470218.2010.504031

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Food pleasantness affects visual selective attention

Giuseppe di Pellegrino, Silvia Magarelli, and Flavia MengarelliCenter for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

Fundamental to adaptive behaviour is the ability to select environmental objects that best satisfycurrent needs and preferences. Here we investigated whether temporary changes in food preferenceinfluence visual selective attention. To this end, we exploited the fact that when a food is eaten tosatiety its motivational value and perceived pleasantness decrease relative to other foods not eatenin the meal, an effect termed sensory-specific satiety. A total of 26 hungry participants were feduntil sated with one of two palatable foods. Before and after selective satiation, participants ratedthe pleasantness of the two foods and then viewed the same as stimuli on a computer screen whileattention was assessed by a visual probe task. Results showed that the attentional bias for the foodeaten decreased markedly from pre- to postsatiety, along with the subjective pleasantness for thatfood. By contrast, subjective pleasantness and attentional bias for the food not eaten did not showany such decrease. These findings suggest that the allocation of visual selective attention is flexiblyand rapidly adjusted to reflect temporary shift in relative preference for different foods.

Keywords: Visual selective attention; Food; Sensory-specific satiety; Pleasantness; Reward value.

Visual selective attention is an adaptive mechan-ism that allows fast and accurate perception ofthe environment by focusing processing resourceson relevant objects (e.g., Corbetta & Shulman,2002; La Berge, 1995; Yantis, 1996, for a review).In recent years, abundant research has suggestedthat the emotional significance of sensory eventscan determine how visual attention is allocated(see Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997;Vuilleumier, 2005). Convergent studies in socialcognition and cognitive and clinical psychology(e.g., Bradley, Mogg, & Lee, 1997; Fox, Russo,& Dutton, 2002; Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves,

2001; Pratto, 1994; Pratto & John, 1991;Williams, Watts, Macleod, & Mathews, 1997)have shown that people pay attention morereadily to emotional stimuli such as snakes,spiders, and angry faces than to neutral stimuli,suggesting that emotional information has aspecial propensity to capture and/or hold atten-tional resources. Consistent with this, brainimaging studies in human participants haverevealed enhanced responses to emotional stimulirelative to neutral stimuli in several brain regions(Sabatinelli, Bradley, Fitzsimmons, & Lang, 2005;Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001),

Correspondence should be addressed to Giuseppe di Pellegrino, Center for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience,

University of Bologna, Via Brusi, 20, 47521 Cesena, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

We would like to thank Elisa Ciaramelli, Alessio Avenanti, and Manuela Sellitto for comments on a previous draft of this

manuscript.

560 # 2010 The Experimental Psychology Society

http://www.psypress.com/qjep DOI:10.1080/17470218.2010.504031

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

2011, 64 (3), 560–571

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thus providing a plausible substrate for theirgreater competitive strength in attracting attention,as observed behaviourally. Emotional effects invisual attention are further enhanced in individualswith high levels of trait- and state-anxiety (Bradley,Mogg, Falla, & Hamilton, 1998; Fox, 1993;Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton 2001; Williams,Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996), which may play arole in the development and/or maintenance ofclinical anxiety disorders (Eysenck, 1992; Mogg &Bradley, 1999; Power & Dalgleish, 1997).

Although much of past research has focused onnegative or threat-related emotions (e.g., fear oranger), pleasant or rewarding stimuli (e.g., food,addictive drugs) may show a similar advantagein the competition for attentional resources.Hunger–satiety manipulation has provided amodel system to explore the influence of motiva-tionally significant stimuli (i.e., food) on thedeployment of visual selective attention. Forexample, Channon and Hayward (1990) found,using the modified Stroop task, that fasting partici-pants were slower in naming the colours of food-related words than control stimuli, in comparisonwith nonfasting participants, which was consistentwith a hunger-related processing bias. Piech,Pastorino, and Zald (2010) reported that food pic-tures were more powerful distractors for hungrythan for sated participants engaged in a visualdetection task. Likewise, studies using the visualprobe task (see below) in nonclinical samplesrevealed that food deprivation is associated withincreased attentional bias for food-related words(Mogg, Bradley, Hyare, & Lee, 1998; Placanica,Faunce, & Soames Job, 2002), compared to thesatiated state. Additional evidence that hungerincreases selective attention to food pictures hasbeen obtained using neuroimaging measures(Mohanty, Gitelman, Small, & Mesulam, 2008)and event-related brain potentials (Stockburger,Schmalzle, Flaisch, Bublatzky, & Schupp, 2009).Finally, recent research has shown that the atten-tional bias to food-related cues is exacerbatedin people who report a predisposition to eatin response to external food cues (Brignell,Griffiths, Bradley, & Mogg, 2009) and in obeseindividuals (Nijs, Muris, Euser, & Franken,

2009), who retain an enduring tendency to orientto food stimuli despite feeding and decreasedself-report of hunger (Castellanos et al., 2009).

Thus, ample evidence suggests that food-related attention is modulated by transient motiva-tional states of hunger and satiety both in normaland in clinical samples. Crucially, however, pre-vious studies assessed the effects of hunger andsatiety on visual selective attention in differentgroups or sessions (held days or weeks apart),without addressing how attention is allocated todifferent foods as their relative motivational/hedonic value transiently changes—for example,over the course of a meal.

To examine this issue, we exploited the fact thatthe pleasantness of the sight and taste of a foodeaten to satiety decreases temporarily relative toother foods not eaten in the meal (Rolls, Rolls,Rowe, & Sweeney, 1981). In this case, one isstill motivated to eat other unconsumed foods,particularly those with different orosensorycharacteristics (Rolls et al., 1981). This phenom-enon has been termed sensory-specific or selectivesatiety (Rolls et al., 1981) and provides a usefultechnique to manipulate the pleasantness andreward value of a stimulus, without modifying itsphysical characteristics (Kringelbach, O’Doherty,Rolls, & Andrews, 2003). Accordingly, any differ-ences observed between behavioural responses to aparticular food stimulus before and after satietycan be attributed to the change in the motiva-tional/hedonic value of that food. Furthermore,by measuring responses to another food that isnot eaten in the meal, it is possible to control fornonspecific confounds, such as increases in thirst,gastric distension, and levels of glucose and lipidsafter feeding. This technique has been used infunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)studies to determine brain regions involved inrepresenting the reward value of olfactory stimuli(Gottfried, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2003) and thesubjective pleasantness of food (Kringelbachet al., 2003). However, this technique has neverbeen used before to examine incentive-basedcontrol of visual selective attention.

In the present study, one of two palatable foodswas devalued by feeding participants to satiety on

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2011, 64 (3) 561

PLEASANTNESS AND VISUAL ATTENTION

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that food. Both before and after the selectivesatiety procedure, participants tasted and ratedthe pleasantness of the two foods and thenviewed the same as stimuli on a computer screenwhile attentional selection was assessed by meansof a visual probe detection paradigm, a commontest of attentional bias (MacLeod, Mathews, &Tata, 1986; see also Bradley et al., 1997; Mogg,Bradley, & Williams, 1995). In this task, two pic-tures were presented simultaneously on the com-puter screen, one on each side of a centralfixation point. A picture depicted one of thetasted foods, and the other a control stimulusunrelated to food or eating. Each picture pairwas presented for either a relatively brief(200 ms) or a long (700 ms) duration and was fol-lowed by a probe, which appeared in the locationpreviously occupied by of one of the pictures.Participants were required to detect the locationof the probe by pressing one of two responsekeys. An attentional bias for food images wouldbe indicated by faster response times to probesreplacing food rather than control pictures, asresponse times are typically faster to probes thatappear in attended, rather than unattended,locations.

To sum up, we examined the attentional biasfor food stimuli before and after participantswere fed to satiety on one of those foods (selectivedevaluation). Our main hypothesis was that theattentional bias for food eaten would decreasesignificantly from pre- to postsatiety, along withthe subjective pleasantness for that food. Bycontrast, we expected that the attentional biasfor food not eaten would not show any suchdecrease.

Method

ParticipantsA total of 26 healthy right-handed volunteers (15females, 11 males) participated in the experiment.The average age of the participants was 25.1 years(range 19–34 years). All participants were free ofcurrent or past psychiatric or neurological illnessas determined by history. The eating attitudestest (EAT-26; Garner, Olmsted, Bohr, &

Garfinkel, 1982) was administered and indicatedno eating disorders in any of the participants(mean score, 3.6; range, 0–14; all scores wereunder the 20-point cut-off).

Participants were instructed to fast for at least 6hours prior to arriving in the laboratory, but werepermitted to drink water. Prior to participationin the experiment, participants were prescreenedto ensure that they found both solid foods (i.e.,Ritz crackers and Canestrelli cookies) to be plea-sant and to ensure that they were not overweight,on a diet, or planning to go on a diet. Participantsremained naıve as to the purpose of the study untildebriefing.

The experiment was performed in accordancewith the ethical standards laid down in the1964 Declaration of Helsinki (InternationalCommittee of Medical Journal Editors, 1991)and was approved by the Ethical Committee ofthe Department of Psychology, University ofBologna.

MaterialsSolid food stimuli included Ritz crackers (Kraft,Italy) and Canestrelli cookies (La Sassellese,Italy). These foods were selected because they areconsistently identified as appetizing and are mark-edly distinguishable in their flavour (one issavoury, and the other is sweet) and texture,thereby facilitating sensory-specific satiety andminimizing the likelihood of the participantsdeveloping a generalized satiety to all solid foods.To assess possible order (i.e., practice or fatigue)effects across sessions (since the postsatietysession was always completed after the presatietysession), we also included oat bran biscuits(Molino Chiavazza, Italy) as hedonically neutralfood stimuli.

Visual stimuli were four digitized colour photo-graphs depicting the three foods and a telephonetoken, used as a distractor stimulus. The imageswere approximately 4.5 cm wide by 4.5 cm tall.The mean luminance and contrast levels of thefour photographs were slightly adjusted with theAdobe PhotoshopTM 7.0 program to achieveuniform values for the different pictures.

562 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2011, 64 (3)

DI PELLEGRINO, MAGARELLI, MENGARELLI

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ProcedureAll testing took place between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.The experiment consisted of two sessions: presati-ety and postsatiety. There was a break between ses-sions during which participants were fed to satietyon one of two palatable foods (selective satietytreatment). More specifically, participants werepresented with a tray containing three transparentbowls, each containing one kind of food (Ritzcrackers, Canestrelli cookies, and oat bran biscuits,respectively) and were invited to eat either Ritzcrackers or Canestrelli cookies for their lunchand to stop eating when they felt pleasantlysatiated. The participants were not informed inadvance which solid food they would be invitedto consume. The specific food used for devaluationwas fully counterbalanced across subjects, such that13 participants were fed to satiety on Ritz crackers,and 13 participants were fed to satiety on theCanestrelli cookies. This selective food devalua-tion procedure served to devalue one of the foodstimuli, although leaving the motivational valueof the other stimulus relatively intact. Note thatparticipants viewed all three types of food(valued, devalued, and neutral) during feeding,thereby minimizing the possibility that attentionaleffects were simply due to overexposure to one typeof food (rather than to change in the subjectivepleasantness) during the selective satietyprocedure.

At the beginning of each session, we collectedbehavioural ratings, including hunger level (0,full; +10, starving), pleasantness (–5, very unplea-sant; +5 very pleasant), and intensity (–5, veryweak; +5, very intense) of the taste of the threefoods (Ritz crackers, Canestrelli cookies, and oatbran biscuits) presented in random order. In eachsession, participants completed first the hungerrating task, followed by pleasantness and intensityrating tasks, which were administered in counter-balanced order across participants.

After the behavioural rating tasks, participantsperformed a computer-based visual probe tasksimilar to that used by Bradley and colleagues(Bradley et al., 1998; Bradley, Mogg, Wright, &Field, 2003). The trial sequence is illustrated inFigure 1. Participants initiated each trial by

pressing the space bar. A fixation point appearedat the centre of the screen for 800 ms. Next, twocolour pictures were presented side by side, flank-ing the central fixation point. The pictures wereseparated by approximately 14 cm from centre tocentre. One photograph depicted one of thethree foods, and the other a telephone token ofcomparable size and luminosity. These task-irrele-vant images were presented for either 200 or700 ms and were then removed. Next, the probe(@ sign) was presented for 100 ms at the locationpreviously occupied by one of the two images.Participants were told to respond immediately tothe left or right location of the probe by pressingone of two response keys (left and right arrowkeys of the keyboard). They were instructed tolook at the fixation point at the start of eachtrial. The duration of the intertrial interval (ITI)varied randomly between 1,000 and 1,500 ms.

Participants completed 24 practice trials andone block of 144 trials in each session. Eachblock was composed of six repetitions of 24 ran-domly intermixed unique trials, resulting fromthe factorial combination of 3 (food type: deva-lued, valued, or neutral) × 2 (food location: leftor right) × 2 (exposure duration: 200 or 700 ms)× 2 (probe position: left or right). Thus, nothingabout the design of the experiment allowedparticipants to predict which image would beprobed.

Figure 1. Schematic illustration of the experimental paradigm. To

view a colour version of this figure, please see the online issue of the

Journal.



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Results

Effects of selective satiety on behavioural ratingsParticipants showed a significant reduction inexperienced hunger ratings after the selective satia-tion procedure, t(25) ¼ 20.01, p , .0001. Meanhunger ratings were 7.46 (SD ¼ 1.47) beforesatiety, but dropped to 1.85 (SD ¼ 0.73) aftersatiety.

Subjective pleasantness and intensity ratings forthe three different food rewards before and afterfeeding to satiety with one of the foods areplotted in Figure 2. Mean subjective ratings wereanalysed by a 3 (food: devalued, valued, orneutral) × 2 (session: pre- or postsatiety) × 2(rating type: pleasantness or intensity) repeated

measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). Theanalysis showed main effects of food, F(2, 50) ¼85.27, MSE ¼ 2.06, p , .001, h2

p ¼ .77, session,F(1, 25) ¼ 37.38, MSE ¼ 1.7, p , .001, h2

p ¼

.47, and rating type, F(1, 25) ¼ 31.15, MSE ¼2.07, p , .001, h2

p ¼ .55, which were qualifiedby a significant Food × Session × Rating Typeinteraction, F(2, 50) ¼ 11.14, MSE ¼ 0.82, p ,

.001, h2p ¼ .31. Post hoc Newman–Keuls tests

showed that the subjective pleasantness of thefoods eaten (devalued) decreased markedly frompre- to postsatiety, t(25) ¼ 9.23, p , .0001,whereas the pleasantness of the foods not eaten(valued) and the neutral foods did not show anysuch changes (both ps . .05), reflecting the effi-cacy of the selective satiation procedure in lessen-ing the value of the food eaten. On the other hand,no significant changes were observed for the sub-jective intensity of taste of the food stimuli whencomparing pre- to postsatiety ratings (all ps..05), confirming that it is the perceived pleasant-ness and not the perceived intensity of taste of thedevalued food that decreases following satiation(Rolls et al., 1981).

Effects of selective satiety on response times in thevisual probe taskResponse latencies above 1,500 ms or below200 ms were deleted from the data set, as wereall incorrect responses, resulting in the removalof 1% of the data. Table 1 presents mean probedetection latencies for each experimentalcondition.

To examine our prediction directly, however,attentional bias scores were calculated for each par-ticipant by subtracting the mean response time toprobes replacing food images from the meanresponse time to probes replacing control images.Greater bias scores indicate greater attention tofood stimuli, relative to control stimuli (i.e., anattentional bias towards food images). Bias scoreswere calculated separately for each type of foodpicture (valued, devalued, and neutral) andexposure duration (200 and 700 ms), in thepre- and postsatiety sessions.

Attentional bias scores were subjected to a 3(food: devalued, valued, or neutral) × 2 (session:

Figure 2. Upper panel: Subjective pleasantness ratings on a scale of

–5 (very unpleasant) to +5 (very pleasant) for the food eaten

(devalued), the food not eaten (valued), and the neutral food,

before and after the selective satiety procedure. Lower panel:

Subjective intensity ratings on a scale of –5 (very weak) to +5

(very intense) for the food eaten (devalued), the food not eaten

(valued), and the neutral food, before and after the selective

satiety procedure.



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pre- or postsatiety) × 2 (exposure duration: 200 or700 ms) repeated measures ANOVA. The analysisrevealed a significant main effect of food, F(2, 50)¼ 10.05, MSE ¼ 992, p , .001, h2

p ¼ .29, indi-cating that attentional bias was greater overall forprobes on valued food than for probes on devaluedand neutral food (both ps , .05), while bias scoresbetween these last two conditions were not differ-ent from each other (p . .05). There was also amarginally significant main effect of session, F(1,25) ¼ 3.84, p ¼ .06, MSE ¼ 1,793, h2

p ¼ .13.More critically, there was a significant two-wayinteraction between food and session, F(2, 50) ¼7.32, p , .01, MSE ¼ 866, h2

p ¼ .23, which issummarized in Figure 3. Post hoc Newman–Keuls tests showed that the attentional bias forprobes at the location of the devalued food was sig-nificantly reduced in the postsatiety relative to thepresatiety session (p , .001), whereas there wasno such decrease for probes at the location of thevalued food (p ¼ .6). As well, no significant differ-ence was found between the attentional bias forprobes replacing neutral foods in the pre- versuspostsatiety session (p ¼ .16), indicating no signifi-cant order effect. Furthermore, attentional biaswas greater for probes on valued food than forprobes on devalued food in the postsatietysession (p ¼ .001), whereas there was no signifi-cant difference between these conditions in thepresatiety session (p ¼ .8). There were no othersignificant results.

Next, we conducted post hoc one-sample t teststo assess whether or not the attentional bias wassignificant within each condition (Bonferroni cor-rected alpha level for these post hoc tests was .008).Results showed that mean bias score (averagedacross exposure durations) for valued food was sig-nificantly greater than zero in the presatiety, t(25)¼ 3.62, p ¼ .002, and postsatiety session, t(25) ¼4.97, p ¼ .001. In contrast, bias score for devaluedfood was significantly greater than zero in the pre-satiety, t(25) ¼ 4.61, p ¼ .001, but not in thepostsatiety session, t(25) ¼ 0.03, p ¼ .9. Therewere no other significant results.

Figure 3. Mean attentional bias (collapsed across exposure

durations) for probes presented at the location of the devalued,

valued, and neutral food, in the pre- and postsatiety sessions.

Error bars indicate standard errors.

Table 1. Mean response times to probes for each experimental condition of the present study

Food Probe replacing

Session

Presatiety Postsatiety

Short duration

(200 ms)

Long duration

(700 ms)

Short duration

(200 ms)

Long duration

(700 ms)

Devalued Food stimulus 347 (31) 342 (20) 359 (54) 363 (30)

Control stimulus 375 (43) 364 (31) 365 (39) 357 (37)

Valued Food stimulus 345 (28) 345 (20) 339 (41) 335 (25)


Neutral Food stimulus 353 (24) 352 (40) 347 (37) 349 (37)


Note: Response times are in milliseconds. Standard deviations in parentheses.



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Finally, to explore the relationship betweenattentional effects and subjective reports of thepleasantness of food, changes in attentional biasscores were calculated by subtracting the atten-tional bias score in the presatiety session fromthe attentional bias score in the postsatietysession, separately for each type of food (data aver-aged across exposure durations). Negative values ofthese scores indicate reduced attentional bias forfood pictures after the satiation procedure.Pearson correlations were calculated betweenchanges in bias scores and changes in rated plea-santness (calculated by subtracting the prefeedingrating of the pleasantness of the taste of a foodfrom the postfeeding rating of the pleasantnessof the same food) for each type of food. These ana-lyses revealed that changes in bias scores for deva-lued food were significantly associated withchanges in the pleasantness ratings, r(24) ¼ .67,p , .001 (see Figure 4), indicating greaterdecrease in attentional bias for consumed food inthose participants who reported greater change inthe pleasantness of that food. This correlation per-sisted (r ¼ .61, p , .002) after removal of oneoutlier with standard residuals greater than +2standard deviations; hence, a single outlier didnot drive this correlation. There was no other sig-nificant result.

Discussion

This study provides behavioural evidence that atransitory decline in the pleasantness of the tasteof a food plays an important role in modulatingthe functioning of covert mental processes, suchas visual selective attention. Using a visual probetask, we found that a food-specific devaluationtreatment induced a considerable reduction inthe attentional bias for devalued foods, parallel tothe decrease in the perceived pleasantness ofthose foods, whereas visual selective attention tovalued foods did not change significantly. In thepresent study, the relative pleasantness of twopalatable foods was varied during the course ofthe experiment by allowing hungry participantsto feed to satiety on one of those foods(Kringelbach et al., 2003; Rolls et al., 1981). Theselective-satiety procedure proved effective, asrated pleasantness for the consumed food showeda marked decrease in the post-compared to thepresatiety session, in the absence of relevantchanges in the rated pleasantness of the uncon-sumed food. As such, these effects are distinctfrom alliesthesia, a change in the hedonic evalu-ation of food and food-related stimuli producedby fluctuations in homeostatic needs (Berridge,1991; Cabanac, 1971), which, unlike selectivesatiety, is not specific to the external sensorystimulation received (i.e., the taste of a particularfood eaten during satiation). In this regard, it isunlikely that the selective decrease in attentionalbias for the consumed food is simply a result ofextensive exposure or familiarity with that foodduring the selective satiety procedure because par-ticipants viewed all food stimuli during feeding(see Method). Furthermore, the significant corre-lation between change in attentional bias and sub-jective pleasantness of the food eaten also supportsthe contention that the attentional effects seenhere were indeed modulated by the hedonicvalue of stimuli rather than by their degrees offamiliarity.

The attentional bias for food pictures did notexhibit a significant degree of variation over thetwo picture exposure durations examined here—namely, 200 and 700 ms. This finding therefore

Figure 4. Relationship between changes in attentional bias scores

and changes in rated pleasantness for the devalued (e.g.,

consumed) food, assessed by Pearson correlation analysis.



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suggests that a bias for food pictures may have aneffect on both the initial orienting and the main-tenance of attention. This observation is consistentwith evidence from previous visual probe studies ofattentional biases for food (Brignell et al., 2009)and drug-related cues (e.g., biases for cigarette-related cues in smokers and alcohol-related cuesin heavy drinkers; e.g., Bradley et al., 2003;Field, Mogg, Zetteler, & Bradley, 2004), whichhave used even longer exposure durations(2,000 ms) than those used here.

It is important to note that the present findingswere observed while participants were required tomake a speeded discrimination judgment on theprobes, and there was no advantage gained frompaying more attention to food than controlstimuli, since food cues were unpredictive as tothe location of impending probes. These resultssuggest that the motivational regulation of visualattention is to a certain degree a spontaneous andinvoluntary process (Bargh, 1997; Piech et al.,2010; Stockburger et al., 2009), operating evenwhen people are not explicitly required to assessthe affective value of stimuli, and these are com-pletely task irrelevant. More generally, our find-ings suggest that mechanisms of visual selectiveattention are flexibly regulated to optimize inter-action of the individual with the environment,depending on current motivational state (Langet al., 1997). Such a feature may be fundamentalin providing attentive processes with both flexi-bility and self-regulation properties (Della Libera& Chelazzi, 2006).

Previous evidence revealed that the deploymentof visual attention in humans can be modulated byexternal financial reinforcers, such as monetaryrewards (Della Libera & Chelazzi, 2006; Smallet al., 2005). Here, we report that short-termchanges in the hedonic evaluation of the food’staste during a meal may also influence visual selec-tive attention, acting as internal, transient drivestates. Several earlier studies (Channon &Hayward, 1990; Mogg et al., 1998; Mohantyet al., 2008; Piech et al., 2010; Placanica et al.,2002; Stockburger et al., 2009) have shown thatselective attention to food stimuli is sensitive tohunger-related motivation. However, a selective

satiety design was not used in previous researchso that attention effects could reflect the partici-pants’ overall level of satiety (or other nonspecificconfounds), rather than hedonic and motivation-related changes in the subjective value of food.Our results confirm and extend previous evidenceby demonstrating that, after selective satiation,perceived pleasantness and attentional bias specifi-cally decrease for the food eaten but not for theother food. These findings are consistent with arecent study (Kemps & Tiggemann, 2009)demonstrating that individuals in whom acraving for chocolate was experimentally inducedpreferentially direct their attention toward choco-late-related cues and away from other highly desir-able food cues. More generally, the present studyprovides clear evidence that the motivational gui-dance of attentional resources is not an all-or-none mechanism (Vuilleumier & Huang, 2009),but, rather, reflects accurate online assessment ofthe hedonic value of the various stimuli presentin the environment.

Animal and human studies of food devaluationindicate that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) maybe critical for signalling changes in the rewardvalue of food stimuli (see Murray, O’Doherty, &Schoenbaum, 2007). For instance, monkeys withOFC lesions fail to alter learned responding afterreinforcer devaluation (Murray et al., 2007).Moreover, fMRI evidence reveals a significant cor-relation between OFC activity and decrease insubjective pleasantness when a food is eaten tosatiety (Kringelbach et al., 2003). Importantly,the present findings raise the possibility thatsignals that have been attributed exclusively to rep-resentation of reward in the OFC and otherreward-related brain areas might be, at least inpart, signals of motivation-related modulation ofattention (Maunsell, 2004).

Two potential limitations of this study deservemention. First, the current study examined onlythe effect of changes in subjective ratings of con-scious pleasure on visual selective attention tofood cues. In line with other studies (Hogarth,Dickinson, Hutton, Elbers, & Duka, 2006;Waters et al., 2009), we found that changes infood liking scores related closely to attentional



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effects. It is important to note, however, thatunconscious affective psychological process maysometimes occur in the mind independent of con-scious feelings (Damasio, 1999; Zajonc, 1980) andrely on different brain structures (Berridge, 2003).Physiological reactions, such as facial electromyo-graphy and skin conductance responses, and brainimaging techniques may provide potentialmeasures of affect, whether or not a consciousaffective reaction is reported. While the presentbehavioural data provide evidence that subjectiveratings of conscious liking are associated withattentional bias to food cues, they cannot ascertainthe role of implicit or unconscious affective pro-cesses in driving visual attention to food stimuli.Second, even though our experimental paradigmallows the appreciation of the attentional biastowards food (compared to control) cues, it doesnot allow attributing such bias to the orientingcomponent of attention (e.g., a food stimuliattracts attention to its location), or the hold/dis-engage component of attention (e.g., once a foodstimulus has been detected, attention tends todwell in that location; e.g., Fox et al., 2001).Several studies (Compton, 2000; Fox et al.,2001, 2002; Yiend & Mathews, 2001) indicatethat negative emotions, such as fear and threat-related emotion, specifically affect the disengagecomponent of visual attention in anxious individ-uals. Notably, these studies have commonly usedexogenous cueing tasks, which allow a moredirect assessment of the attentional disengagementmechanism by comparing the delay to reorientfrom invalid emotional versus invalid neutralcues. Recently, however, Koster, Crombez,Verschuere, and de Houwer (2004) have proposedthat a visual probe task may be used to examineorienting and disengagement components ofattention by comparing responses to probes inemotional–control pairs to probes in control–control pairs. Using such an experimental pro-cedure, a recent investigation has shown that cho-colate cravers have difficulty in disengagingattention from craving-related food rather thanheightened vigilance for such cues (Kemps &Tiggemann, 2009). The present study did notinclude control–control pairs, thereby precluding

a detailed analysis of the critical components ofattention that are influenced by motivationalcues. Additional research is needed to uncoverthe cognitive mechanisms of motivated attentionand to identify exactly which of these mechanismsare common (or distinct) across different kinds ofemotional (e.g., fear) and motivational (e.g., food)stimuli.

The findings of this study have potential clini-cal implications. Research has found food-relatedattentional biases in patients with eating disorders(Lee & Shafran, 2004; Nijs et al., 2009; Shafran,Lee, Cooper, Palmer, & Fairburn, 2007) and hassuggested that such biases may play a role incausing and/or maintaining dysfunctional eating(Lee & Shafran, 2004). Interestingly, a recentstudy (Castellanos et al., 2009) found that obeseadults maintain an increased attention to foodimages regardless of reported hunger/satiety, indi-cating dysregulated responses to food cues inobesity. It would be important to clarify whethertransitory changes in the subjective pleasantnessof food (after selective satiety) affect attentionalbias to food cues in obese individuals, as reportedhere in normal-weight people.

To conclude, the control of food intake requiresthe coordination of motivational and higher cog-nitive processes. The present findings suggestthat the allocation of visual attention is flexiblyand rapidly adjusted to reflect temporary shift inrelative preference for different foods. Shiftingthe balance of attention away from consumedfoods may serve to optimize exploitation of avail-able food resources and to increase the variety offood consumed.

Original manuscript received 25 November 2009

Accepted revision received 7 June 2010

First published online 10 September 2010

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food pleasantness affects visual selective attention

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