Attentional Biases for Food vs Social Media Rewards: Specific or General Reward Based Pathology and the Implications for Social Media Addiction

This study aims to run a reaction-timed visual search task (VMAC task) with social media logos and fast food logos to measure attentional bias and see if previous studies' findings with various other stimuli can be replicated with these reward cues. Additionally, this study aims to further expand on the very limited existing literature on general reward based pathology in regard to attentional biases by comparing the results of the VMAC fast food and social media logo tasks to see if they capture attention in a similar way or not. Furthermore, this study aims to observe the relationships between an attentional bias to social media and fast food logos, frequency of social media use and fast food consumption and social media addiction.