Trial on the Effect of Media Multi-tasking on Attention to Food Cues and Cued Overeating

Childhood obesity is a critical public health problem in the United States. One factor known
to contribute to childhood obesity is excess consumption. Importantly, excess consumption
related to weight gain is not necessarily driven by hunger. For example, environmental food
cues stimulate brain reward regions and lead to overeating even after a child has eaten to
satiety. This type of cued eating is associated with increased attention to food cues; the
amount of time a child spends looking at food cues (e.g., food advertisements) is associated
with increased caloric intake. However, individual susceptibility to environmental food cues
remains unknown. It is proposed that the prevalent practice of media
multi-tasking—simultaneously attending to multiple electronic media sources—increases
attention to peripheral food cues in the environment and thereby plays an important role in
the development of obesity. It is hypothesized that multi-tasking teaches children to engage
in constant task switching that makes them more responsive to peripheral cues, many of which
are potentially harmful (such as those that promote overeating). The overarching hypothesis
is that media multi-tasking alters the attentional networks of the brain that control
attention to environmental cues. High media multi-tasking children are therefore particularly
susceptible to food cues, thereby leading to increased cued eating. It is also predicted that
attention modification training can provide a protective effect against detrimental
attentional processing caused multi-tasking, by increasing the proficiency of the attention
networks. These hypotheses will be tested by assessing the pathway between
media-multitasking, attention to food cues, and cued eating. It will also be examined whether
it is possible to intervene on this pathway by piloting an at-home attention modification
training intervention designed to reduce attention to food cues. It is our belief that this
research will lead to the development of low-cost, scalable tools that can train attention
networks so that children are less influenced by peripheral food cues, a known cause of
overeating. For example, having children practice attention modification intervention tasks
regularly (which could be accomplished through user-friendly computer games or cell
phone/tablet apps) might offset the negative attentional effects of media multi-tasking.