The relationship between reward context and inhibitory control, does it depend on BMI, maladaptive eating, and negative affect?

Abstract

Background Recent studies suggest that higher Body Mass Index (BMI) is associated with reduced inhibitory control in contexts of palatable food. However, due to limitations of previous studies, it remained the question whether this reduction is specific to food contexts, and whether it generalizes to other contexts of reward, such as money. This main question was addressed in the current study. In addition, we explored the effect of maladaptive eating and stress regarding inhibitory control across the contexts that differed in terms of reward. Methods In total, 46 participants between 19 and 50 years old (39% males and 61% females) with an average BMI of 23.5 (SD = 3.9) participated. Participants filled out questionnaires and performed a go/no-go task (indexing inhibitory control) with three conditions (neutral, food, and money condition). Results Relatively high (above median) BMI was associated with challenged inhibitory control in the food relative to the neutral context, but not in the money relative to neutral context. Explorative analyses suggested that maladaptive eating and stress were associated with reduced inhibitory control in the food context. Only rumination was associated with reduced inhibitory control in the money context. Conclusions The effects of BMI, maladaptive eating behavior, and stress on inhibitory control were specific to the food context, and did not generalize to a non-intrinsic reward condition, operationalized with money pictures. Our results imply that (research on) interventions directed at improving inhibitory control in relation to overweight and obesity, should consider food-reward context.

The effect of transcranial direct current stimulation over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on behavioral and brain activity indices of visuospatial attention in intrinsic reward contexts

“…The VSC task was presented using OpenSesame (Mathôt et al, 2012). It was an adapted version from the original (Posner et al, 1980) and included an intrinsic reward condition based on previous research (Houben et al, 2014; Tsegaye et al, 2022) in addition to the neutral condition. Figure 1A illustrates the details of the task.…”

“…It was an adapted version from the original (Posner et al 1980) and included an intrinsic reward condition based on previous research (Houben et al 2014;Tsegaye et al 2022) in addition to the neutral condition.…”

“…In the current study, similar to previous studies, we segregated neutral and reward blocks to circumvent this issue (Tsegaye et al 2022). In contrast to previous research that depended on learned rewards (e.g., money), we employed an intrinsic reward condition involving appetizing food pictures, drawing from an earlier study that highlighted differences between conditions in terms of inhibitory control (Tsegaye et al 2022).…”

No support for the effect of tDCS on frontal alpha asymmetry and behavioral and brain activity indices of inhibitory control

“…The SST was developed using OpenSesame (Mathôt et al, 2012). It was adapted from the original version (Schmajuk et al, 2006) and included an intrinsic reward condition (food) based on previous studies (Houben et al, 2014; Tsegaye et al, 2022). The task consisted of 10 blocks in total, with one practice and four main blocks for each condition (neutral/reward) separately.…”