Yixuan Yin¹ (), Abe Leite, Gregory J. Zelinsky; ¹Stony Brook University

Attention bias in anorexia nervosa has yielded contradictory findings, with both avoidance of high-calorie foods (e.g., Horndasch et al., 2020) and heightened attentional capture (e.g., Neimeijer et al., 2017). This inconsistency reflects an unclear underlying cognitive mechanism. Drawing on Gaspelin et al.’s (2015) Signal Suppression Hypothesis, that salient distractors are actively suppressed below baseline, this project examines whether individuals who scored higher on the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) actively suppress attention to high-calorie food cues, potentially explaining previously mixed findings. Participants completed a dual-task paradigm combining visual search trials with probe trials. On each trial, six stimuli were presented in a ring. In Block 1, replicating the classic signal suppression effect, participants searched for a predefined target (green diamond) and indicated whether a black dot on the target appeared on the left or the right. Probe trials required recalling letters briefly presented on each stimulus. In Block 2, targets varied across trials, and stimuli were objects. The critical manipulation in this block was the identity of each object: each trial included one high-calorie food, two low-calorie foods, and three neutral objects. The search target was always a neutral object. The dependent measure was probe recall accuracy, which allowed us to measure the suppression of attention to high-calorie food items below baseline. Data collection is ongoing (current N = 17). Although the current sample is underpowered for definitive statistical inference, preliminary analyses reveal a large linear trend that higher EDE-Q scores predict reduced probe recall accuracy for high-calorie food stimuli relative to neutral stimuli (R² = 0.23, p = .054). This pattern suggests that individuals with greater anorexic tendencies exhibit selectively suppressed processing of high-calorie cues. Together, these findings provide preliminary evidence for active attentional suppression of high-calorie food cues as an underlying mechanism explaining previously mixed results.