title: Selective attention to food-related stimuli in hunger: are attentional biases specific to emotional and psychopathological states, or are they also found in normal drive states?
abstract: Previous work has indicated that anxiety disorders and eating disorders are associated with selective processing of stimuli relevant to patients' concerns (e.g. Mathews and MacLeod, 1994; Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 25-50; Channon et al., 1988; British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27, 259-260). A dot probe task was used to investigate whether attentional biases are also a feature of a normal drive state. Specifically, we examined whether hunger is associated with biases in selective attention and in pre-attentive processes for food-relevant stimuli. Subjects with high levels of hunger showed a greater attentional bias for food-related words presented in a suprathreshold exposure condition (words shown for 500 msec), in comparison with those with low hunger. There was no evidence in the present study of a hunger-related bias in pre-attentive processes (i.e. when words were shown for 14 msec and masked). Results suggest that a non-emotional motivational state, such as hunger, is associated with a bias in certain aspects of information processing, such as selective attention, for stimuli that are relevant to the motivational state. Findings are discussed in relation to recent research into emotion-related cognitive biases.
authors.affiliation: University of Cambridge, U.K.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mogg
authors.forename: B P
authors.initials: BP
authors.lastname: Bradley
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hyare
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D015982:Bias; D004328:Drive; D001068:Feeding and Eating Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005518:Food Preferences / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger; D008297:Male; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning