The majority of adults in the UK and US are overweight or obese due to multiple factors including excess energy intake. Training people to inhibit simple motor responses (key presses) to high-energy density food pictures reduces intake in laboratory studies. We examined whether online response inhibition training reduced real-world food consumption and weight in a community sample of adults who were predominantly overweight or obese (N = 83). Participants were allocated in a randomised, double-blind design to receive four 10-min sessions of either active or control go/no-go training in which either high-energy density snack foods (active) or non-food stimuli (control) were associated with no-go signals. Participants' weight, energy intake (calculated from 24-h food diaries), daily snacking frequency and subjective food evaluations were measured for one week pre- and post-intervention. Participants also provided self-reported weight and monthly snacking frequency at pre-intervention screening, and one month and six months after completing the study. Participants in the active relative to control condition showed significant weight loss, reductions in daily energy intake and a reduction in rated liking of high-energy density (no-go) foods from the pre-to post-intervention week. There were no changes in self-reported daily snacking frequency. At longer-term follow-up, the active group showed significant reductions in self-reported weight at six months, whilst both groups reported significantly less snacking at one- and six-months. Excellent rates of adherence (97%) and positive feedback about the training suggest that this intervention is acceptable and has the potential to improve public health by reducing energy intake and overweight.

HighlightsWe examine whether cognitive training (response inhibition) modifies food intake.Food stimulus-specific training can influence food intake.These effects are more pronounced in restrained eaters.General training to non-food stimuli did not influence food intake.

BackgroundExaggerated or simplistic news is often blamed for adversely influencing public health. However, recent findings suggested many exaggerations were already present in university press releases, which scientists approve. Surprisingly, these exaggerations were not associated with more news coverage. Here we test whether these two controversial results also arise in press releases from prominent science and medical journals. We then investigate the influence of mitigating caveats in press releases, to test assumptions that caveats harm news interest or are ignored.Methods and FindingsUsing quantitative content analysis, we analyzed press releases (N = 534) on biomedical and health-related science issued by leading peer-reviewed journals. We similarly analysed the associated peer-reviewed papers (N = 534) and news stories (N = 582). Main outcome measures were advice to readers and causal statements drawn from correlational research. Exaggerations in press releases predicted exaggerations in news (odds ratios 2.4 and 10.9, 95% CIs 1.3 to 4.5 and 3.9 to 30.1) but were not associated with increased news coverage, consistent with previous findings. Combining datasets from universities and journals (996 press releases, 1250 news), we found that when caveats appeared in press releases there was no reduction in journalistic uptake, but there was a clear increase in caveats in news (odds ratios 9.6 and 9.5 for caveats for advice and causal claims, CIs 4.1 to 24.3 and 6.0 to 15.2). The main study limitation is its retrospective correlational nature.ConclusionsFor health and science news directly inspired by press releases, the main source of both exaggerations and caveats appears to be the press release itself. However we find no evidence that exaggerations increase, or caveats decrease, the likelihood of news coverage. These findings should be encouraging for press officers and scientists who wish to minimise exaggeration and include caveats in their press releases.

Less supervision by the executive system after disruption of the right prefrontal cortex leads to increased risk taking in gambling because superficially attractive—but risky—choices are not suppressed. Similarly, people might gamble more in multitask situations than in single-task situations because concurrent executive processes usually interfere with each other. In the study reported here, we used a novel monetary decision-making paradigm to investigate whether multitasking could reduce rather than increase risk taking in gambling. We found that performing a task that induced cautious motor responding reduced gambling in a multitask situation (Experiment 1). We then found that a short period of inhibitory training lessened risk taking in gambling at least 2 hr later (Experiments 2 and 3). Our findings indicate that proactive motor control strongly affects monetary risk taking in gambling. The link between control systems at different cognitive levels might be exploited to develop new methods for rehabilitation of addiction and impulse-control disorders.

Training individuals to inhibit their responses towards unhealthy foods has been shown to reduce food intake relative to a control group. Here we aimed to further explore these effects by investigating the role of stimulus devaluation, training protocol, and choice of control group. Restrained eaters received either inhibition or control training using a modified version of either the stop-signal or go/no-go task. Following training we measured implicit attitudes towards food (Study 1) and food consumption (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 1 we used a modified stop-signal training task with increased demands on top-down control (using a tracking procedure and feedback to maintain competition between the stop and go processes). With this task, we found no evidence for an effect of training on implicit attitudes or food consumption, with Bayesian inferential analyses revealing substantial evidence for the null hypothesis. In Study 2 we removed the feedback in the stop-signal training to increase the rate of successful inhibition and revealed a significant effect of both stop-signal and go/no-go training on food intake (compared to double-response and go training, respectively) with a greater difference in consumption in the go/no-go task, compared with the stop-signal task. However, results from an additional passive control group suggest that training effects could be partly caused by increased consumption in the go control group whereas evidence for reduced consumption in the inhibition groups was inconclusive. Our findings therefore support evidence that inhibition training tasks with higher rates of inhibition accuracy are more effective, but prompt caution for interpreting the efficacy of laboratory-based inhibition training as an intervention for behaviour change.