Trial on the Effect of Media Multi-tasking on Attention to Food Cues and Cued Overeating

Summary

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. It is proposed 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. It is hypothesized 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). The 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 predicted that attention modification training can provide a protective effect against detrimental attentional processing caused multi-tasking, by increasing the proficiency of the attention networks. These hypotheses will be tested by assessing the pathway between media-multitasking, attention to food cues, and cued eating. It will also be examined whether it is possible to intervene on this pathway by piloting an at-home 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.

Conditions

• Attention Concentration Difficulty
• Obesity, Childhood

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Sustained attention

participants will complete a sustained attention task

BEHAVIORAL

media multi-task

participants will complete multiple media tasks at the same time

OTHER

Video

participants will watch a video of media tasks being completed

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

  collaborator NIH

• Dartmouth College

  collaborator OTHER

• Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Diane Gilbert-Diamond, ScD · Dartmouth College

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age

13 Years

Max Age

17 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-06-05

Primary Completion

2020-03-12

Completion

2020-03-12

Countries

• United States

Study Locations