“Effects of Allocation of Attention on Habituation to Olfactory and Visual Food Stimuli in Obese Children”
PI: Denise Wilfley PhD
Project Overview
Over the past two decades, obesity in youth and adults has been rising in the United States at an alarming rate with current data estimating that 31% of children and adolescents ages 6-12 are classified as overweight or at risk for overweight. In spite of growing attention to this epidemic problem, little translational research has been done in the area of pediatric obesity – that is, research on how basic biological processes underlying obesity inform behavioral approaches to its treatment and prevention. Existing research on the treatment of obesity can be supplemented with basic laboratory studies exploring the biological processes that bring about dysregulated eating in obese youth. The proposed research is a translational study on habituation, a basic biological process that influences ingestive behavior in obese youth. Potential implications of the study would include applying knowledge of the habituation process to enhance and refine the eating-regulation component of existing treatment and prevention strategies.
Over a 6-month period, thirty 8- to 12-year-olds who are overweight (Body Mass Index [BMI] greater than the 95th percentile for age and sex) and thirty normal-weight 8- to 12-year-olds (BMI less than the 85th percentile for age and sex) will be recruited from the St. Louis metropolitan area. .Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three groups: controlled search task, automatic search task and no task.It is hypothesized that participants in the controlled search task will not habituate to food, whereas those in the automatic or no task will show a decrease in habituation across trials. In addition, we expect an interaction such that the difference among groups will be more pronounced in obese participants as compared to normal-weight participants.