K. Dürrschmid, J. Wallner, W. Kneifel

Department of Food Sciences and Technology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna

This work was inspired by the findings of Neuroscientists, that obese individuals show a different activation of food intake regulating neural systems when looking at high-calorie food compared to normal weighted persons. The aim of our study was to find out, if there are significant differences in the looking behaviour of obese and normal weighted persons when they are confronted with visual stimuli of food of obvious different energy content and of composed dishes. A Tobii eye tracking plant was used to investigate the hypothesis, that the visual behaviour is the same. Thirty persons with an BMI higher than 30 and 30 persons with an BMI between 20 and 25 were used as test persons. Pictures showing one food each and pictures of meals with different types of food were presented to them and the instructions were formulated in a way which veiled the test aims to the test persons. We found several differences in the course of saccades and in the average time obese and normal weighted individuals were looking at different regions of the presented visual food stimuli.