Impairment of cognitive performance in dietary restrained women when imagining eating is not affected by anticipated consumption

Dietary restraint is associated with impairments on tasks requiring concurrent processing of food-related information and performance of a secondary cognitive task. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether manipulating information about post-task consumption of food enhances the cognitive impairments observed in restrained eaters when they are required to think about food at the same time as performing a simple reaction time task. On separate trials within the same session, restrained (n = 29) and unrestrained eaters (n = 29) were asked to imagine eating a slice of chocolate cake and drinking glass of water while performing a simple reaction time task. Half the participants were told that they would not be able to consume the cues following the task, while the other half were told that they would be required to eat the cake and drink the water. The reaction time performance of restrained eaters was slowed when imagining eating the cake, relative to imagining drinking the water in both the consumption and no consumption conditions. No effects of cue exposure on reaction time were found for unrestrained eaters. The results suggest that dietary restrained eaters are more reactive to food cues but that this effect is not modulated by information about post-task consumption of the food.