The Raw and the Cooked: ‘Wanting’ and Selective Attention to Images of Foods

Abstract

To investigate whether food energy level (high vs. low food) and processing (raw vs. cooked food) impact the selective and intensive components of overt attention, we asked healthy participants to look, while their oculomotor behaviour was recorded, at different food images and indicate their subjective levels of wanting and liking of the observed food items with Likert scales. Information about participants’ hunger state and eating behaviour (with the EDI-3 questionnaire) were also collected. Importantly, the two core motivational components of wanting and liking were indexed by the objective measures of gaze fixations and pupillary dilations, respectively, that is the selective and intensive components of overt attention. Gaze fixation results (indexing wanting) revealed that gaze spent less time on low-energy raw items compared to other foods. By contrast, pupillary dilation results (indexing liking) revealed larger pupil diameters for high-energy cooked food compared to other foods. These two objective measures differentially predicted participants’ ratings of wanting and liking, respectively. Additionally, each participant’s current hunger state was estimated by self-report and the analysis showed that hungrier participants were more likely to look at high-energy cooked items than the not-hungry subgroup. These results are consistent with evolutionary biases for energy-dense foods. Finally, dietary habits and high concerns about weight gain, measured via EDRC scores, influenced fixation times, stressing the potential relevance of food features in attentional biases and food choices of individuals with disordered eating patterns.

Keywords: Food processing, Food Energy Density, Motivational State, Gaze Parameters, Pupil Dilation, Psychological Patterns, EDI-3, EDRC