Gating of food and non-food information from working memory

Abstract

Prior research has suggested that biased attention towards food cues in the environment may contribute to the onset and maintenance of binge eating. Here, we examine whether individuals who report high levels of binge eating also have difficulty keeping task-irrelevant food-related information out of working memory (WM). To investigate this, we used the contralateral delay activity (CDA), a neurophysiological measure reflecting the amount of information held in WM. Experiment 1 confirmed differences in behavioral performance and CDA amplitude when holding one versus two items in WM and between stimulus type (food vs. non-food). Experiment 2 replicated these behavioral findings but not the CDA results. Furthermore, we found no significant differences in filtering efficiency as a function of distractor type (food vs. non-food) or self-reported binge eating frequency, contrary to our hypotheses. Future work could benefit from adopting a behavioral measure of filtering efficiency or examining filtering cost.