Ua wasp approaches you and your attention is totally magnetized. It is indeed crucial to be able to protect oneself from an imminent danger. But what about what, far from worrying us, attracts us? Is our attention as effective in detecting the object of our desires? The researchers were interested in a daily and universal pleasure, food. But how to measure the power of intentional attraction of food? To do this, the researchers competed in imagination. They first wondered if food could preferentially direct the attention of hungry participants.
For example, Shelley Channon and Andrew Hayward, from the Department of Psychology at University College London, used a variant of the Stroop task, in which participants are usually shown words which they must give not the identity but simply the color of the ink. Classically, we present the word “blue” written in red, and the correct answer is therefore “red”. This task measures our ability to focus on one piece of information (the color of the ink) and to ignore another parameter that is not relevant here (the meaning of the word). In Channon’s protocol, it involved giving the ink color of food names while ignoring the word identity. Interestingly, participants could come out of a fast or be in a full state. The results clearly show that the hungriest subjects remained riveted to the name of the food and were thus slower to give the color of the ink than the satiated control subjects, thus revealing the attentional bias linked to hunger.
A link with the appetite hormone
Similarly, Richard Piech and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University (United States) have shown that hunger leads to an irrepressible attraction of attention to images of food during a visual detection task. It goes even further, since Nils Kroemer and his colleagues from the University of Dresden (Germany) have shown that this phenomenon of attraction is directly linked to the metabolism of ghrelin, the hormone involved in appetite. Karin Mogg, from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), and her colleagues have, for their part, shown that hunger also makes us more attentive, without our knowledge, not only to the images but also to the words designating food. This is a good reason to take a little gourmet break in our working day! This is to avoid being distracted by an unfortunate little hollow…
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