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Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense

Overweight and obesity are considered a huge problem in modern societies. Previous studies have shown that people who are regularly distracted by playing videogames or watching TV while eating are more likely to be overweight and that the number of people that are gaming worldwide is rising. Further...

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Autores principales: Schadll, Stephan, Rodriguez-Raecke, Rea, Heim, Lennart, Freiherr, Jessica
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8316920/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34335370
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.657188
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author Schadll, Stephan
Rodriguez-Raecke, Rea
Heim, Lennart
Freiherr, Jessica
author_facet Schadll, Stephan
Rodriguez-Raecke, Rea
Heim, Lennart
Freiherr, Jessica
author_sort Schadll, Stephan
collection PubMed
description Overweight and obesity are considered a huge problem in modern societies. Previous studies have shown that people who are regularly distracted by playing videogames or watching TV while eating are more likely to be overweight and that the number of people that are gaming worldwide is rising. Further, it has been established that both, watching TV or playing video games lead to an increased snack intake and a lower rating of perceived taste intensity. Since flavor perception is accomplished not only by the sense of taste but also the sense of smell, we investigated the influence of cognitive load created by playing a video game on odor intensity perception. The participants played a low or high difficulty version of Tetris while presented with odors of food and non-food items. A higher skin conductance response (SCR) along with a decrease in task performance verified that the higher difficulty level leads to a higher cognitive load. Our behavioral data indicates a significant decrease in intensity estimates of food odors and non-food odors during the high compared to low cognitive load condition. We conclude that odor intensity estimation is influenced by real-life cognitive tasks which might in turn lead to overeating while distracted.
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spelling pubmed-83169202021-07-29 Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense Schadll, Stephan Rodriguez-Raecke, Rea Heim, Lennart Freiherr, Jessica Front Psychol Psychology Overweight and obesity are considered a huge problem in modern societies. Previous studies have shown that people who are regularly distracted by playing videogames or watching TV while eating are more likely to be overweight and that the number of people that are gaming worldwide is rising. Further, it has been established that both, watching TV or playing video games lead to an increased snack intake and a lower rating of perceived taste intensity. Since flavor perception is accomplished not only by the sense of taste but also the sense of smell, we investigated the influence of cognitive load created by playing a video game on odor intensity perception. The participants played a low or high difficulty version of Tetris while presented with odors of food and non-food items. A higher skin conductance response (SCR) along with a decrease in task performance verified that the higher difficulty level leads to a higher cognitive load. Our behavioral data indicates a significant decrease in intensity estimates of food odors and non-food odors during the high compared to low cognitive load condition. We conclude that odor intensity estimation is influenced by real-life cognitive tasks which might in turn lead to overeating while distracted. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-07-14 /pmc/articles/PMC8316920/ /pubmed/34335370 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.657188 Text en Copyright © 2021 Schadll, Rodriguez-Raecke, Heim and Freiherr. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Schadll, Stephan
Rodriguez-Raecke, Rea
Heim, Lennart
Freiherr, Jessica
Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title_full Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title_fullStr Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title_full_unstemmed Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title_short Playing Tetris Lets You Rate Odors as Less Intense
title_sort playing tetris lets you rate odors as less intense
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8316920/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34335370
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.657188
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