Selective attention to food-related stimuli in hunger: are attentional biases specific to emotional and psychopathological states, or are they also found in normal drive states?

Previous work has indicated that anxiety disorders and eating disorders are associated with selective processing of stimuli relevant to patients' concerns (e.g. Mathews and MacLeod, 1994; Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 25–50; Channon et al., 1988; British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27, 259–260). A dot probe task was used to investigate whether attentional biases are also a feature of a normal drive state. Specifically, we examined whether hunger is associated with biases in selective attention and in pre-attentive processes for food-relevant stimuli. Subjects with high levels of hunger showed a greater attentional bias for food-related words presented in a suprathreshold exposure condition (words shown for 500 msec), in comparison with those with low hunger. There was no evidence in the present study of a hunger-related bias in pre-attentive processes (i.e. when words were shown for 14 msec and masked). Results suggest that a non-emotional motivational state, such as hunger, is associated with a bias in certain aspects of information processing, such as selective attention, for stimuli that are relevant to the motivational state. Findings are discussed in relation to recent research into emotion-related cognitive biases.