Abstract
It has been suggested that patients with eating disorders and healthy women with body shape dissatisfaction exhibit characteristic responses to information related to human body or food. Previously we indicated that participants with high body dissatisfaction detected human body-related stimuli faster than neutral stimuli in a visual search task. The present study investigated the relationship between body dissatisfaction and brain activity in healthy women using a visual search task involving body-related information. Participants comprised female undergraduate and graduate students without eating disorders. First, the body dissatisfaction subscale (part of the Eating Disorders Inventory) was administered to the participants. Subsequently, we performed an experiment using the visual search paradigm. Participants were shown stimuli comprising pictures of the human body and neutral stimuli not related to the body using a computer display. Either four pictures in the same category (target absent trial) or three pictures in the same category and one in a different category (target present trial) were presented simultaneously. In target present trials, the one is the target and the others are distractors. Participants judged whether the four stimuli were the same, or included one odd category by pressing a key. Their reaction times (RTs) and concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy in the parietal and occipital regions. The RTs showed no dependence on body dissatisfaction. Moreover, in both the parietal and occipital regions, oxy-Hb negatively correlated with the body dissatisfaction score. The correlations occurred when the body stimuli were used as a target or distractors. These results suggest that the human body-related stimuli might be more salient; therefore, the stimuli might reduce the amount of resources necessary to perform the task for participants with a high body dissatisfaction score.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014