Media multi-tasking and cued overeating: assessing the pathway and piloting an intervention using an attentional network framework 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. We propose 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. We believe 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). Our 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 our conviction that attention modification training can provide a protective effect against detrimental attentional processing caused multi-tasking, by increasing the proficiency of the attention networks. We will directly test these hypotheses by assessing the pathway between media-multitasking, attention to food cues, and cued eating. We will also examine whether it is possible to intervene on this pathway by piloting an 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.
This research aims to investigate the causal pathways among media multi-tasking, attention to food cues, and eating in the absence of hunger. This research is critical to understanding the effects of the prevalent practice of media multi-tasking on cued overeating - an understudied relationship - that may have important public health consequences.
