Do dessert pictures still grab our attention after we eat until full?

Details

Adults who had not been fasting completed an attention task at intervals before and after a midday meal. They looked for targets in a rapid stream of images, with food or non-food pictures appearing as irrelevant distractions. For lunch, they ate preferred, pre-selected sandwiches until full.

Food pictures captured attention even when appetite was low. As hunger rose before lunch, all the food categories became more distracting, and target detection was least accurate when hunger peaked. After lunch, pictures of the sandwich type participants had eaten became markedly less distracting; pictures of other sandwiches also became less distracting, but to a smaller extent. Dessert pictures showed no such reduction.

The central finding is that fullness did not reduce distraction equally across foods in this task. The authors interpret the pattern as evidence that attention becomes less responsive to a particular food after eating it to fullness. However, the dessert result does not establish that attention was exactly unchanged, explain why dessert pictures remained distracting, or show that participants would eat dessert.