Neural Correlates of Attentional Biases in Dietary Choice: Role of Childhood Socioeconomic Status

Childhood poverty has been shown to increase adult risk for obesity above and beyond its direct effects on adult socioeconomic status (SES). One proposed mechanism of these effects is by shifting behavioral patterns of dietary consumption and choice, for example by increasing rapid attention to high-calorie unhealthy foods. Yet, whether such neural mechanisms can explain observed differences in dietary behavior based on childhood SES remains an open question. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine early attentional correlates of low childhood SES during a dietary choice task, based on research suggesting that early attentional biases toward high-calorie foods emerge within 260 ms after stimulus onset. Participants (N = 41) first completed a behavioral bidding task for different snack foods varying in taste and health, then viewed and rated the same snack foods while their brain activity was recorded with ERP. Childhood socioeconomic status was assessed via retrospective self-report measures. Although bidding behavior was significantly correlated with liking ratings, no significant effects of childhood SES or food healthfulness on bidding were observed. ERP analyses of activity over parietal electrodes revealed that early attentional responses (200–280 ms after stimulus onset) tracked the health quality of food images, with larger amplitudes to unhealthy vs. healthy foods as previously reported. However, both the main effect of childhood SES and interaction of childhood SES and food healthfulness were non-significant. Although our inferences were limited by a relatively small incidence of low childhood SES in our sample, these results provide a first examination of how childhood SES interacts at the neural level with early attentional processing of foods. Future work should explore these questions further using larger and more diverse samples to gain a fuller picture of the influences of childhood SES on dietary choice.