Hungry for colours? Attentional bias for food crucially depends on perceptual information
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Hungry for colours? Attentional bias for food crucially depends on perceptual information Claudia Del Gatto1 · Allegra Indraccolo1 · Claudio Imperatori1 · Riccardo Brunetti1 Received: 30 July 2019 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
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. Keywords Attentional bias · Bottom-up processes · Perceptual dominance · Food perception
Introduction It is well established that our brain cannot process all the information arriving from the sensorial systems (Marois and Ivanoff 2005). In several situations people seem to automatically direct their attention towards salient stimuli, especially towards potentially dangerous or rewarding stimuli (Theeuwes and Belopolsky 2012; Waechter et al. 2014). Attentional bias, thus, reflects the tendency to allocate disproportional amount of attentional resources to stimuli that is salient and important for an individual, when compared to a neutral one (LeDoux 1995; Ohman et al. 2001; Handling editor: Joanna Ganczarek (Pedagogical University of Crakow). Reviewers: two researchers who prefer to remain unanonymous. * Claudia Del Gatto [email protected] 1
Cognitive and Clinical Psychology Laboratory, Department of Human Sciences, Università Europea Di Roma, Via degli Aldobrandeschi 190, 00163 Rome, Italy
Ohman and Soares 1993; Pratto and John 1991). This process seems to be affected at least by three different mechanisms (Pool et al. 2016): (1) exogenous involuntary attention, driven by the low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimuli (e.g. colour, shape, size); (2) end
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