title: Benefits of a hungry mind: When hungry, exposure to food facilitates proactive interference resolution.
abstract: Hunger is an everyday motivational state, which biases cognition to detect food. Although evidence exists on how hunger affects basic attentional and mnemonic processes, less is known about how motivational drive for food modulates higher cognition. We aimed to investigate the effects of food deprivation on proactive interference resolution, in the presence and absence of food. Normal-weight participants performed a recency probes paradigm providing an experimental block with food and object stimuli as well as a control block with object stimuli only, in a fasted and a sated state. Results showed that the interaction of shifts in nutritional state with the perception of food cues evoked an altered resolution of proactive interference. Satiety led to impaired performance, whereas a hungry state resulted in strengthened resistance to proactive interference and lying in between, the control block presenting neutral objects remained unaffected by nutritional state manipulation. Additionally, a further increase in proactive interference resolution occurred when the conflicting probe depicted food compared to non-food objects. We conclude that when exposed to food, hunger initiates biased competition of active memory representations in favor of prioritized source information at cost of familiar, but irrelevant information. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of an arousal-biased competition in working memory.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, A-6020 Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria; Department of Educational Science, Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, A-9020 Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria. Electronic address: thomas.maran@uibk.ac.at.
authors: Thomas
authors: T
authors: Maran
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, A-6020 Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. Electronic address: pierre.sachse@uibk.ac.at.
authors: Pierre
authors: P
authors: Sachse
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, A-6020 Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. Electronic address: markus.martini@uibk.ac.at.
authors: Markus
authors: M
authors: Martini
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, A-6020 Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. Electronic address: marco.furtner@uibk.ac.at.
authors: Marco
authors: M
authors: Furtner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005508:Food Deprivation; D005518:Food Preferences; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012201:Reward; D012528:Satiety Response; D015854:Up-Regulation; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cognitive control; Hunger; Motivation; Proactive interference; Working memory