Study title

These are data are from three laboratory studies examining the effect of focused attention on food intake. Human participants recruited from the Merseyside area consumed meals in an eating laboratory under different experimental conditions of focused attention vs. no focused attention. The data are measurements of food intake, participant self-report questionnaires and participant characteristics (e.g. age). Obesity is now a major biosocial issue that affects most of the developed world. Rises in obesity have been caused primarily by increases in the amount of food people have been eating. However, the long-term reductions to food consumption which are required to promote weight loss are difficult to achieve for most people on their own. Recent work has shown that memory for recent eating experiences is an important determinant of eating behaviour; by having an accurate memory representation of what we have been eating throughout the day, we can make better decisions about how much to eat. This raises the possibility of developing intervention tools that target memory for recent eating in order to help people eat more healthily. In line with this, initial results suggest that encouraging individuals to eat in a more 'attentive' manner, by ensuring attention is paid towards meals being eaten, improves memory for recent eating and reduces the amount of food people tend to eat. These finding are promising as even modest reductions to food consumption can promote weight loss and therefore have positive effects on health and well-being. Although it has been suggested that memory informs food consumption, how this process occurs is unclear. If we are able to understand how 'attentive' eating reduces food consumption, this may have public health benefit. Thus, a thorough investigation of how memory influences eating behaviour is now required. Memory for recent eating consists of multiple episodic 'elements', such as visual memory for meal size and memory for how...