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

Dartmouth Health

Status: Completed

Conditions: Attention Concentration Difficulty; Obesity, Childhood

Treatments: Other: Video; Behavioral: Sustained attention; Behavioral: media multi-task

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; NIH

Identifiers

NCT03882957

D19065

1R21HD097475-01 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Full description

[3/14/2020]: Study recruitment temporarily halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Enrollment: 92 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 13 to 17 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• N/A.

Exclusion criteria

• Inadequate English proficiency, a vision disorder that is not corrected with corrective lenses, and relevant food allergies.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Crossover Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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92 participants in 3 patient groups

Video

Active Comparator group

Description:

videos of media tasks being completed

Treatment:

Other: Video

media multi-task

Experimental group

Description:

media tasks

Treatment:

Behavioral: media multi-task

sustained attention task

Experimental group

Description:

a cognitive task that trains sustained attention

Treatment:

Behavioral: Sustained attention