The Performance Of Inhibitory Control, Working Memory Of 10 Years Old Children Of Different Weight Status-the Impact Of Food Cues

Recently, pediatric obesity epidemic has been increased largely in our country, Inhibitory control(IC) and working memory(WM) as the core components of EFs, were seemed to be close related to weight-status, but most research focus on IC and WM of neutral stimulus and neglect the importance of food cues. Considering the different characteristic of rewards of material, our research divided the stimulus into 2 different types, food and neutral, to investigate the difference between neutral and food specific IC and WM of normal weight and overweight/obese children, our purpose was a better understanding of why children were getting overweight/obesity.8 tasks were used in our study, including Flanker task, Stop-signal task of food, word and toy condition, N-back task of food and blank condition, and WM span task of Cauchy matrix.30 normal weight (BMI=15.8±1.36) and 30 overweight/obese (BMI=20.68±1.80) 10 years old children were tested. Result showed that:(1) Compare with the healthy weight children, overweight/obese ones’not only got a worse attentive inhibition to both food and neutral stimulus, but their response inhibition was also worse than normal ones; overweight/obese children had a poor response inhibition to all they conditions in response inhibitory task, while their food response inhibition was the worst, but interestingly, no significant difference were found in word and toy condition. What’s more, there’s normal weight children’s performance in all three condition were equally better than overweight/obese children. (2) Overweight/obese children got a smaller score in neutral updating than normal weight children, while no significant were found in food condition. The WM span score of overweight/obese is lower that their normal weight companion, and no significant difference were seen for blank WM span score. (3) Further regressive analyze showed that neutral and food-specific IC and WM can predict children’s BMI, but by comparison, food-specific IC and WM got a better prediction than neutral ones. Overall, our finding demonstrate that there’s considerable link between food-specific IC and WM and weight status, and provide important insight into prevention and intervention of obesity.