Effects of Hunger on Visual Perception in Binocular Rivalry

• Published in: Frontiers in psychology Vol. 10; p. 418
• Main Authors: Weng, Xin, Lin, Qi, Ma, Ye, Peng, Yu, Hu, Yang, Zhou, Ke, Shen, Fengtao, Wang, Huimin, Wang, Zhaoxin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 12.03.2019
• Subjects: b-CFS; binocular rivalry; dominance time; hunger; probe-detection; Psychology; binocular rivalry; dominance time; probe-detection; b-CFS; hunger
• ISSN: 1664-1078; 1664-1078
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00418

The effect of hunger on visual perception is largely absent from contemporary vision science. Using a well-established visual phenomenon termed binocular rivalry, this study was carried out to investigate the effects of hunger on visual perception. A within-subject design was applied in which participants attended two sessions before and after their lunch or dinner, i.e., a hunger state and a satiated state. In Experiment 1, we found that the mean dominance times to food-related pictures were larger in the hungry condition than that in the satiated condition, while the mean dominance time to the non-food stimuli were unaffected. In Experiment 2, we found the times to break through continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) for both food-related and non-food-related pictures were not affected by hunger. In Experiment 3, a probe-detection task was conducted to address possible response-biases. Our findings provide evidence that hunger biases the dynamic process of binocular rivalry to unsuppressed and visible food stimuli, while processing suppressed and invisible food-related was unaffected. Our results support the notion that the top-down modulation by hunger on food-related visual perception is limited to visible stimuli.