FOOD STIMULI AND GENDER

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2015; Leven & Leven, 1991). No consensus is found in the literature concerning time for
initial attention and maintained attention (Doolan et al., 2015), and some argue that it is
impossible to distinguish these two mechanisms (Leven & Leven, 1991).
The present study used eye-tracking technology to measure eye movements and
fixations in timing when stimulus attention is still controlled by an automatic process and
not driven as much by a conscious process. The goal was to measure intuitive eye
movements. As previously mentioned, it has been reported that women have a healthier food
choice pattern than men (Garriguet, 2009; Liebman et al., 2006; Westenhoefer, 2005). In
this study the goal was to investigate whether this healthier food choice pattern could be
reflected as attentional bias. For this reason a comparison between healthy and unhealthy
food stimuli was chosen.
2.3 Healthy and Unhealthy
It is very difficult to state that a certain food is healthy or not and find guidelines to
define whether a certain food is healthy. Nevertheless, fast food is thought to be unhealthy,
as it has been linked with obesity; it has been proposed that foods with high sugar, salt, and
fat content are unhealthy (Bugge & Lavik, 2012; James, 1990). Due to the nutritional profile,
these mentioned foods can be categorized as foods with high energy density.
Energy density is usually measured in calories per gram and is defined as the quantity
of energy per food weight. Research has pointed out that lowering the intake of energy
density could be useful to sustain satiety and lower energy consumption (Rolls, 2009). It is
proposed that foods with high energy density constitute a challenge to the systems that
control human appetite with circumstances for which these systems were not intended
(Prentice & Jebb, 2003), promoting weight gain and obesity. This physiological failure can
lead to “passive over-consumption” (Prentice & Jebb, 2003). Prentice and Jebb (2003) state