Eating disorder symptoms and foraging behavior: Do symptoms of eating disorders affect foraging of food related items?

Abstract

An important aspect of the orienting of human visual attention, foraging behavior, has only recently caught researchers' attention even though it has been investigated in the animal literature for the last decades. Visual attention can be biased when certain stimuli capture our attention, especially threatening or anxiety-provoking stimuli. Anxiety is highly comorbid with eating disorders with immense fear of gaining weight or being fat being one of the diagnostic criteria. Therefore, potential attentional biases in eating disorders were measured with an iPad foraging task to see if eating disorder symptoms effect foraging performance in any way. Forty-four participants completed four self-report questionnaires measuring symptoms of eating disorders and the iPad foraging task using food items (healthy and unhealthy) and other non-food objects. Participants were split into two groups, symptom group and no symptom group. The results revealed a difference between the groups on a number of foraging variables, although they were not statistically significant. On the other hand, the scores on the self-report questionnaires did not predict foraging performance to an acceptable degree. This study needs to be repeated in a clinical sample to get a clearer picture of the effects of eating disorder symptoms on foraging behavior.