Neural mechanisms of biased attention towards disorder-salient stimuli in bulimia nervosa

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Neural mechanisms of biased attention towards disorder-salient stimuli in bulimia nervosa PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa (BN) are characterized by aberrant eating behaviors that are thought to be promoted and maintained by an overvaluation of and preoccupation with weight, shape, and food. It has been suggested that excessive concern with body image, and factors that affect body image (e.g., food and eating), may maintain disordered eating behavior and other symptoms of BN by directing limited cognitive resources towards disorder-salient stimuli, thereby interfering with perceptual and cognitive tasks and distorting how the environment is perceived and interpreted by the individual. However, the temporal dynamics of attentional engagement, the specificity of attention biases to disorder-salient stimuli, and the underlying neural mechanisms that may give rise to them are still poorly understood. Although recent years have witnessed a marked increase in basic cognitive and neuroscience research related to eating disorders, it is generally acknowledged that the field lags behind other psychiatric disorders in terms of progress in understanding the brain circuits and pathophysiology of this debilitating form of mental illness. Gaining this understanding is critical if the promise of refined treatment modalities targeting BN is to be realized. The proposed project will contribute to this endeavor by using innovative behavioral and electrophysiological methods to measure attention biases towards disorder-salient stimuli, state-of-the-art imaging methods to assess brain functional connectivity, and correlation-based statistical approaches to examine the relationship between the two. This will provide a convergent approach that tests specific hypotheses regarding core processes that may be disrupted in BN. Basic knowledge about the neural basis of attention biases in BN can provide insights into the nature of a large number of psychiatric and neurological disorders that feature maladaptive preoccupations with disorder-relevant stimuli, such as anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders. Moreover, understanding attention biases and their neural bases can contribute to the development of novel behavioral and brain stimulation-based methods of effectively treating these debilitating conditions.