1.3. Potential Moderators of Training Effects
The type of evaluation may be an important moderator. Researchers in this field have typically assessed two types of food evaluation: the implicit evaluation, which is measured using the implicit association task or the affective priming paradigm, and the explicit evaluation, which is measured by a visual analogue scale (VAS) (e.g., “How attractive does this food item look to you?”). It should be noted that when using a VAS to measure explicit food evaluation, the researchers’ areas of interest differ. For example, the VAS could be used to measure food preference, craving, palatability, attractiveness, monetary value, etc. Some studies have shown that not responding to food items in food-specific inhibition training may lower the explicit evaluations of these items
[17][31]. In contrast, evidence of the effect of food-specific inhibition training on implicit food evaluation is relatively sparse
[32][33].
Another important moderator of training effects on food evaluation may be the training paradigm. Researchers have speculated that a higher possibility of food inhibition in the go/no-go task compared to the stop-signal task might lead to a greater degree of effectiveness in terms of changing eating behaviors and food devaluation
[12][34].
Food novelty in the evaluation tasks may also be an important moderator. Indeed, some studies have suggested that the devaluation effect is specific to the trained food cues, and cannot be generalized (e.g., new stimuli)
[35][17].
Body weight (e.g., excessive weight/obesity vs normal weight) may be another important moderator, for two reasons
[26]: (1) overweight and obese individuals may gain more from the training compared with normal-weight participants, since they could have lower inhibition capacity
[36]; and (2) the greater responsivity to food of overweight or obese participants
[37] may impair their performance in the inhibition training, rendering the training less efficient.
2. Food-Specific Inhibition Training for Food Devaluation
Many people today live in an obesogenic food environment, and are constantly exposed to low-nutritive-value yet appetitive foods—for example, foods containing large amounts of sugar and fat [38]. These environmental conditions paired with internal factors (e.g., impulsivity) could lead to higher food evaluation (e.g., food cravings), which might aggravate dysfunctional eating behaviors such as bulimia nervosa or binge eating [3]. Interventions aimed at lowering the evaluation of appetitive foods, therefore, may help people to regulate their eating behavior or body weight.
There are various theories to explain the food devaluation effect of food-specific inhibition training. For example, the BSI theory [17][18] proposes that the conflict between the automatic approach tendency triggered by appetitive food stimuli and the task requirement of inhibition during the go/no-go or stop-signal task elicited a negative effect, which might be attached to specific food items and cause food devaluation. In addition, some researchers have argued that stopping and avoidance are linked to an aversive system [22][23], and this association might spill over to the responses to the no-go/stop food stimuli presented during training [25].
The food devaluation effect is supported by recent neuroimaging studies [14][39]. More specifically, researchers have found that, compared with changes observed in controls, food-specific inhibition training reduces activation in reward regions of the brain (e.g., putamen, mid-insula) in response to no-go/stop food images. Critically, activation change in the reward regions of the brain in response to the no-go/stop images was positively associated with changes in the evaluation of these images (e.g., r =0.44). Although such results are still nascent, these functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies and future neuroscience studies similar to them can directly measure value signals in the brain, and may provide further conclusive evidence for the food devaluation effect of food-specific inhibition training [28].
It was proposed that the decrease in food evaluation may play a critical role in promoting healthier eating behaviors. Supporting this notion are the findings of Veling et al. [40], who showed that the effect of food-specific inhibition training on food choices was entirely mediated by decreased evaluation of the foods that had been associated with the no-go cues. Lawrence et al. [41] assessed self-reported eating behaviors and weight loss, but did not observe any evidence of mediation. Further (preregistration) studies are needed to investigate whether this food devaluation effect could act as a mechanism underlying the positive effects of food-specific inhibition training in terms of changing peoples’ eating behaviors.
The effect of food-specific inhibition training on food evaluation was moderated by the type of evaluation. In particular, food-specific inhibition training was found to have a statistically significant effect on explicit food evaluation, but not on implicit food evaluation. Similarly, a previous meta-analysis showed that repeated inhibition of behaviors in response to appetitive stimuli (mainly alcohol stimuli) does not change implicit evaluation of these stimuli
[42]. Taken together, current evidence suggests that stimulus-related inhibition training only changes explicit stimulus evaluation, which might provide further insights into how motor response training influences behavior. For example, it might be more likely that stimulus-related inhibition training changes behavior via changes in the explicit (but not the implicit) evaluation of stimuli, given the robust effect of training on the former.
Food novelty was also found not to moderate the effects of food-specific inhibition training on food evaluation. A series of experiments conducted by Chen et al.
[17][31] showed a lack of generalization of training effects to untrained or novel food items when training was focused at the item level (e.g., similar food items appear on go and no-go trials). However, there has been evidence to suggest that food-specific inhibition training could be generalized to untrained stimuli when training is focused on a category level (e.g., healthy food = go; unhealthy food = no-go)
[25][43][44]. Although the effects of food-specific inhibition training on the evaluation of trained food (
g+ = 0.291) were numerically larger than on the evaluation of generalized food (
g+ = 0.130) or mixed food (
g+ = 0.150), the differences were not statistically significant. It should be noted that there were only eight and nine studies that investigated the effects of training on generalized food and mixed food, respectively, which might result in an insufficiency of statistical power when conducting the moderator analysis. Therefore, future studies or meta-analyses should continue to test the generalization effects of food-specific inhibition training.
Weight status also did not emerge as a statistically significant moderator, suggesting that food-specific inhibition training causes similar decreases in food evaluation in normal-weight and overweight/obese participants. However, it should be noted that only seven food-specific inhibition training studies were conducted with people with excessive weight or obesity. Therefore, more studies focusing on overweight or obese individuals are needed before food-specific inhibition training can be translated into clinical interventions.
In conclusion, the idea that food-specific inhibition training can produce beneficial changes in food evaluation. In particular, the type of evaluation moderated the effects of training on food evaluation, with food-specific inhibition training significantly decreasing participants’ explicit, but not their implicit, food evaluation. However, since most of the included studies focused on trained food items and short-term outcomes in normal-weight samples, more research is needed on the persistence of the training effects, and on the extent to which the effects can be generalized to untrained food items or different populations (e.g., overweight or obese individuals).