Attention to food stimuli in binge eating disorder: Electrophysiological evidence

Attentional biases towards food play an important role in the pathology of binge eating disorder (BED). Later stage electrophysiological potentials (P300, late positive potential) present promising markers of motivated attention with high temporal, albeit low spatial resolution. Complementing this, the N2pc is an earlier-latency component providing the possibility of more directly analyzing visuospatial attention. Therefore, we tested a group with BED (N = 60), as well as an overweight (OW; N = 28) and normal weight (NW; N = 30) group without BED in a Go/No-Go paradigm using food and nonfood distractor images. Only the OW group in exclusively the Go trials displayed a stronger spatial attention allocation towards nonfood distractors as evidenced by an increased N2pc amplitude. In the P300's time window, the OW group displayed no attentional bias towards food and the NW group only did so in the absence of a target. Solely the BED group allocated more motivated attention towards food distractors both in Go and No-Go trials. In the following late positive potential (LPP), the OW group exhibited a general attentional bias towards food distractors, while the BED group only did so in the absence of a target. These results are discussed in light of the incentive sensitization theory and a potential early attentional suppression of potent distractors.