Effects of Hunger on Visual Perception in Binocular Rivalry

• Main Authors: Xin Weng, Qi Lin, Ye Ma, Yu Peng, Yang Hu, Ke Zhou, Fengtao Shen, Huimin Wang, Zhaoxin Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-03-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: binocular rivalry; hunger; dominance time; b-CFS; probe-detection
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00418/full

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.