Do food pictures make it harder to stop yourself from responding?
Food pictures made people respond faster and more automatically regardless of hunger, but how that related to dieting success depended on whether they had just eaten.
Source
Food-cue affected motor response inhibition and self-reported dieting success: a pictorial affective shifting task
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Pictorial affective shifting (go/no-go) task with food vs neutral targets and distractors; Study 2 added a between-groups manipulation where half ate a snack before testing (satiated) and half stayed hungry.
- N
- N=102 · 102 women in Study 2 (51 satiated, 51 hungry). The Study 1 participant description is missing from the available text, so its sample size is not stated here.
- Population
- Young female university students in Germany, mostly of normal weight.
- Outcome
- Reaction times, commission errors (responding to distractors) and omission errors (missing targets) for food vs neutral stimuli, and their correlations with BMI, self-reported dieting success, impulsivity and food craving.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Young women did a go/no-go task in which they pressed a key for pictures of one category (for example, food) and withheld responses to the other (neutral objects), with the rule reversing every other block. Study 1 tested hungry participants; Study 2 used more trials and visually matched pictures, and had half of the participants eat a sweet yoghurt-like snack beforehand while the other half stayed hungry. Participants also reported BMI-related, dieting success, impulsivity and food craving measures.
What they found
In both studies, participants responded faster to food targets and missed fewer of them than neutral targets. In Study 2, which produced more errors, participants also wrongly responded to food distractors more often than to neutral distractors, and eating beforehand did not change these food-versus-neutral differences. Hunger did change individual-difference links: when hungry, women with higher dieting success responded faster and made fewer errors in food blocks, but this advantage disappeared when satiated, and after eating, lower dieting success predicted bigger rises in craving.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The samples were healthy young women of mostly normal weight, so the results may not apply to men, people with obesity or people with eating disorders. There was no second attractive non-food category, so faster responses to food may partly reflect food being a smaller, easier-to-recognise category rather than its reward value. Study 1 had very few errors overall, and many correlations were tested, so some individual-difference findings may not replicate; the correlational links with dieting success cannot show cause and effect.
Key terms
- Go/no-go task
- A task where people respond quickly to one type of stimulus and must withhold responding to another, measuring response inhibition.
- Commission error
- Responding to a stimulus you were supposed to ignore; a sign of failed inhibition.
- Omission error
- Failing to respond to a target you were supposed to respond to; often a sign of attentional lapses.
- Affective shifting task
- A go/no-go variant using emotional or appetitive stimuli where which category is the target switches between blocks.
- Dieting success
- A person's self-rated ability to control their eating and weight in line with their goals.
- Preload-disinhibition effect
- The finding that some restrained eaters eat more, not less, after being made to eat a high-calorie food first.
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In this task, what is a commission error?
Common questions
Why did the authors increase the number of trials in Study 2?
Study 1 produced so few errors that differences in inhibition could have been hidden by a ceiling effect, so Study 2 used more trials to generate enough commission errors to compare.
Does being hungry make food pictures harder to resist?
Not in this study: the food-versus-neutral differences in speed and errors were the same whether participants had just eaten or not; hunger mattered only for how performance related to dieting success and impulsivity.
Why is a category-size effect a concern?
Food is a narrower category than 'neutral objects', and narrower categories can be recognised faster, so the speed advantage for food could reflect recognition ease rather than motivational pull.
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