No heightened temporal attentional bias towards food or overweight bodies in adolescents with obesity

A better understanding of factors contributing to the development and maintenance of obesity is needed in order to generate effective interventions. One factor that may be responsible for making some individuals more vulnerable to overeating and remaining obese is an increased attentional bias (AB) towards food. For individuals with obesity food stimuli may be processed relatively efficiently and require less attentional resources to enter awareness. Once a food stimulus has captured attention, it may be preferentially processed and granted prioritized access to limited cognitive resources. Such capturing of attention is termed temporal AB and heightened temporal AB might undermine attempts to restrict food intake and render individuals vulnerable to overeating and remaining obese. To test whether temporal AB could play a role in the maintenance of adolescent obesity, this study tested whether adolescents with obesity showed a greater temporal AB towards food than adolescents with a healthy weight using a single target Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task (RSVP). Fifty-one adolescents with obesity and 51 adolescents with a healthy weight matched on age, sex and educational level (79 % female, M age = 16.5) completed the RSVP with food and neutral pictures as distractors. We added pictures of overweight bodies as distractors to explore the relevance of processing priority of body features in adolescents with obesity. We found no difference in temporal AB towards food or overweight bodies between adolescents with obesity and adolescents with a healthy weight. Our findings provided no evidence for the notion that these biases may play a role in the maintenance of adolescent obesity.