Measuring shifts in attentional bias following satiety: A within-subject eye-tracking study in healthy-weight adults

Abstract

Hunger and satiety are key physiological states that regulate food intake and contribute to the maintenance of body weight. Identifying appetite phenotypes, such as reduced satiety sensitivity, holds significant potential for developing personalized prevention and treatment strategies for obesity. However, a key challenge in obesity research is the lack of objective, quantitative tools to measure the physiological states of hunger and satiety. We developed the Food Attentional Bias (FAB) task, a novel, free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm designed to capture shifts in attentional bias toward food. In this study, we investigated within-subject changes in attentional bias toward food before and after eating in a cohort of healthy-weight individuals (N=57) using the FAB Task. Our results indicate a marked decrease in dwell time to food stimuli after eating, regardless of BMI, sex, or age. A linear mixed model for relative dwell time revealed a significant interaction effect between the area of interest (AOI) category and meal condition (premeal vs postmeal) on dwell time (F(4, 5538) = 23.011, p < .001). Post hoc comparisons for the AOI * Meal interaction revealed that the dwell times for food AOIs were significantly greater premeal than postmeal (mean difference = 0.070, p < .001). These findings suggest that as the body’s satiety signals increase postmeal, the motivational value of food decreases, leading to a reduction in attentional bias toward food stimuli. This dynamic recalibration of attention may act as an objective physiological marker of satiety, illustrating how internal physiological states influence attention allocation following food consumption.