The Effect of Attention on Body Size Adaptation and Body Dissatisfaction

Attentional bias to low fat bodies is thought to be associated with body dissatisfaction—a symptom and risk factor of eating disorders. However, the causal nature of this relationship is unclear. In three preregistered experiments, we trained370 women to attend towards either high or low fat body stimuli using an attention training dot probe task. For each experiment, we analysed the effect of the attention training on 1) attention to subsequently-presented high versus low fat body stimuli, 2) visual adaptation to body size, and 3) body dissatisfaction. The attention training had no effect on attention towards high or low fat bodies in an online setting (Experiment 1), but did increase attention to high fat bodies in a laboratory setting (Experiment 2). Neither perceptions of a “normal” body size nor levels of body dissatisfaction changed as a result of the attention trainingin either setting. The results in the online setting did not change when we reduced the stimulus onset-asynchrony (SOA) of the dot probe task from 500ms to 100ms (Experiment 3). Our results provide no evidence that the dot probe training task used here has robust effects on attention to body size, body image disturbance, or body dissatisfaction.