When individuals eat while distracted, they may compensate by consuming more afterwards. Here, we examined the effect of eating while driving, and explored potential underlying mechanisms. Participants (N = 116, 73.3% female) were randomly allocated to complete a driving simulation (distraction condition) or to watch someone else drive (control condition) while consuming 10g (50.8 kcal) of potato chips. Afterwards, participants rated the taste intensity and hedonic experience, reported stress levels, and were then given the opportunity to eat more chips. As hypothesized, participants consumed more chips after the driving simulation. Stress levels were higher in the driving compared to control condition, but were inversely related to consumption amount, ruling out stress as explanatory mechanism. Saltiness ratings differed between the driving and passive viewing condition, only when controlling for stress. The current findings converge with earlier work showing that distracted eating can drive overconsumption, which in turn can lead to long-term health implications. Limitations, implications and potential directions are discussed.
Distracted eating can cause overconsumption. Whereas previous work has shown that cognitive load leads to lower subjective taste intensity and increased subsequent consumption, the mechanism behind distraction-induced overconsumption remains unclear. To elucidate this, we performed two event-related fMRI experiments that examined how cognitive load affects neural responses and subjective ratings in terms of intensity and preference, respectively, to solutions varying in intensity. In Experiment 1 (N=24), participants tasted weak sweet and strong sweet glucose solutions and rated their intensity while we concurrently varied cognitive load using a digit-span task. In Experiment 2 (N=22), participants tasted five different glucose concentrations under varying cognitive load and then indicated their preferences for these concentrations. Participants in Experiment 1 rated strong sweet solutions as less sweet under high compared to low cognitive load, which was accompanied by attenuated activation under high cognitive load in the right middle insula and bilateral DLPFC while tasting the strong vs. weak sweet solutions. Psychophysiological interaction analyses showed that cognitive load also altered connectivity between middle insula and nucleus accumbens and DLPFC and middle insula for the strong sweet solution. In Experiment 2, cognitive load did not affect participants’ preferences for the varying concentrations. fMRI results revealed that cognitive load attenuated DLPFC activation for the strongest sweet solutions in the study.In conclusion, our behavioral and neuroimaging results suggest that cognitive load dampens the sensory and preference processing of strong sweet solutions in particular, which may indicate higher competition for attentional resources for strong sweet than weak sweet solutions under high cognitive load. Implications for future research are discussed.
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