Children's diets are often too high in sugary confectionery items, and low in fruit and vegetables. This imbalance contributes to rising rates of childhood obesity and other health conditions associated with poor diet.
One way to encourage children to choose healthier options is to use cognitive modification tasks such as food-specific inhibitory control training (FSICT). These tasks utilise paradigms such as the Go/No-Go task and Stop Signal Task (traditionally used to measure inhibitory control) as a means to improve resistance to energy-dense foods. This is achieved by consistently pairing these foods with Stop or No-Go signals within the task.
Past research has found that this approach can lead to children choosing healthy foods over energy-dense foods (Porter et al., 2018), and consuming fewer calories from energy-dense foods (Folkvord et al., 2016). Our research has also looked into the feasibility of the training as a tool for families to use at home. This research used a computerised version that was accessible online via laptop or desktop computers. A number of parents indicated that a touch-screen version would be easier for them to use with their children, and data suggests that use of touchscreen devices is on the rise amongst children.
This study aims to test whether an app-based version of FSICT is as effective as the computer-based version we have used in previous research. The two are directly compared, and an additional computer-based control task is also tested for comparison. Outcome measures include the number of healthy foods children choose in a hypothetical shopping task, children's ratings of how "yummy" the food's look to them, and the health status of their final real-food choice at the end of the experiment.