Probing behavioral responses to food: Development of a food-specific go/no-go task

Abstract

The ability to exert self-control in the face of appetitive, alluring cues is a critical component of healthy development. The development of behavioral measures that use disease-relevant stimuli can greatly improve our understanding of cue-specific impairments in self-control. To produce such a tool relevant to the study of eating and weight disorders, we modified the traditional go/no-go task to include food and non-food targets. To confirm that performance on this new task was consistent with other go/no-go tasks, it was given to147 healthy, normal weight volunteers between the ages of 5 and 30. High-resolution photos of food or toys were used as the target and nontarget stimuli. Consistent with expectations, overall improvements in accuracy were seen from childhood to adulthood. Participants responded more quickly and made more commission errors to food cues compared to nonfood cues (F(1,140) = 21.76, P<0.001), although no behavioral differences were seen between lowand high-calorie food cues for this non-obese, healthy developmental sample. This novel food-specific go/no-go task may be used to track the development of self-control in the context of food cues and to evaluate deviations or deficits in the development of this ability in individuals at risk for eating problem behaviors and disorders.

Executive functioning and disinhibited eating in children and adolescents

“…Difficulties inhibiting a desired behavioural response, such as consuming additional portions of palatable foods, may contribute to a consistent pattern of overeating associated with excess weight gain. However, from this perspective, it is unclear why the link between food‐specific behavioural disinhibition, as assessed with the Food Go/No‐Go Task, and energy intake was nonsignificant in adjusted models. This pattern of findings may suggest that broad behavioural control difficulties are associated with disinhibited eating patterns when youth are presented with an array of palatable and nonpalatable food options, such as in the current study's protocol.…”

“…Food‐specific behavioural disinhibition was measured with the Food Go/No‐Go Task . Participants are asked to press a button when a target “go” image (eg, toy) is presented in the centre of the screen.…”

A Psychophysical Approach to Test: “The Bignetti Model”

“…Nowa-days, the relationship between food, diet and health is a major topic of the media. 22,23 Obviously, such scope is totally out of the interests of this work.…”

Behind binge eating: A review of food-specific adaptations of neurocognitive and neuroimaging tasks

“…Across six runs, the task examined go responses to high-calorie foods compared with no-go responses to household items, go responses to low-calorie foods compared with no-go responses to household items, go responses to household items compared with no-go responses to high-calorie foods, go responses to household items compared with no-go responses to low-calorie foods, go responses to high-calorie foods compared with no-go responses to low-calorie foods, and go responses to low-calorie foods compared with no-go responses to high-calorie foods [113]. Teslovich and colleagues [114] developed a similar go/no-go task that included control images of toys instead of household items and did not include the two runs that directly contrasted high-calorie go cues versus low-calorie no-go cues and vice-versa. This four-run task was tested in healthy children and adults, but to our knowledge, the task has not yet been used to study binge-eating populations.…”

“…All food and non-food images used in the first study were matched on a variety of dimensions, including brightness, complexity, and color composition [113], but whether participants perceived the food and non-food images as equally pleasant or rewarding is unknown. In the second study, an independent sample rated all stimuli for valence and arousal to ensure food and non-food stimuli were matched on these parameters [114], but the images were not matched on visual characteristics like complexity and color. Other food-specific adaptations of the go/no-go task use neutral object and food words as stimuli [115–117], which may be less arousing, rewarding, or emotionally evocative than images.…”