Open AccessImplicit food odour priming effects on reactivity and inhibitory control towards foods
Author(s) -
Marine Mas,
MarieClaude Brindisi,
Claire Chabanet,
Stéphanie Chambaron
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0228830
Subject(s) - negative priming , priming (agriculture) , cognition , obesity , inhibitory control , psychology , overweight , inhibitory postsynaptic potential , eating behavior , reactivity (psychology) , developmental psychology , medicine , biology , neuroscience , selective attention , endocrinology , botany , germination , alternative medicine , pathology
The food environment can interact with cognitive processing and influence eating behaviour. Our objective was to characterize the impact of implicit olfactory priming on inhibitory control towards food, in groups with different weight status. Ninety-one adults completed a modified Affective Shifting Task: they had to detect target stimuli and ignore distractor stimuli while being primed with non-attentively perceived odours. We measured reactivity and inhibitory control towards food pictures. Priming effects were observed on reactivity: participants with overweight and obesity were slower when primed with pear and pound cake odour respectively. Common inhibitory control patterns toward foods were observed between groups. We suggest that non-attentively perceived food cues influence bottom-up processing by activating distinguished mental representations according to weight status. Also, our data show that cognitive load influences inhibitory control toward foods. Those results contribute to understanding how the environment can influence eating behaviour in individuals with obesity.