Assessing the Relationship Between Cognitive Control and Weight Control.

Abstract

Obesity is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes, potentially including cognitive factors. Theories of cognition and obesity have typically focused on executive functions, broadly defined, and findings have been somewhat inconsistent across studies. Here we focus on a new hypothesis about one potential core cognitive issue in obesity: cognitive control difficulties. The central idea motivating this research is that efficient cognitive control is critical to effective weight control. Specifically, vulnerability in the capacity to resist distraction during demanding cognitive tasks may be related to weight regulation difficulties. Moreover, such vulnerability may be specific to situations requiring control over food-related distraction. Here we assess cognitive control in working memory and sustained attention by examining resistance to task-intrinsic distraction in working memory tasks, and task-extrinsic distraction in sustained attention tasks. In particular, we use a modified item-recognition working memory task (the recent-probes task), as well as list-based directed ignoring and directed forgetting tasks to assess the removal of task-intrinsic distraction from working memory. We use signal-detection vigilance tasks with and without distraction to assess the control of sustained attention in the presence of task-extrinsic distraction. We find that overweight/obese participants demonstrate specific cognitive control vulnerability in resisting different types of distraction, in the contexts of managing the contents of working memory and maintaining focused attention. Specifically, overweight/obese individuals show increased food-related semantic interference from task-intrinsic information in working memory relative to lean controls, increased food-related proactive interference from task-intrinsic information in working memory relative to food-neutral proactive interference, and poorer performance in the presence of task-extrinsic distraction in sustained attention. However, the content-specificity of these effects varied. In the working memory domain, interference was only increased when overweight/obese participants were required to control distraction from food-related information. Conversely, in the sustained attention domain, there was no evidence of such content-specificity. Results concerning other weight-related variables such as dieting and restrained eating are also considered, though the results concerning these variables were less consistent. Taken together, these findings suggest a relationship between cognitive control in the form of resistance to distraction and weight regulation, though the causal direction of this relationship remains unclear.