An exploration of the implicit food attitudes of people with Type-1 Diabetes using reaction-time and electrophysiological measures

Abstract

People with type-1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) have to be aware of their dietary intake for health reasons and this study aims to investigate whether their food attitudes are different from non diabetic controls. Adult participants with T1DM (n = 12) and non diabetic controls (n = 12) were recruited to this affective priming study on food attitudes. Participants were exposed to picture primes from 3 food categories (high-fat sweet, high-fat savoury and low-fat) and to pictures of non-food items (i.e. chair, ball). Brain activity was recorded during the affective priming task using EEG to explore electrophysiological differences between the groups. The results found positive implicit and explicit attitudes towards all food-types with no group differences. The EEG data focussed on N200, P300 and LPP ERP’s and group differences were observed for the N200 ERP. The T1DM group demonstrated a larger N200 than the control group in all food and non-food conditions suggesting that there are electro cortical differences in brain functioning between these two groups and reasons for this difference are presented.