Children with an attentional bias to food or an abnormal behavior response to its cues are likely to overeat and become obese, according to a recent study.

The brain becomes wired to seek - and expect - greater rewards from food, which can cause obesity. Researchers have found away to train people ignore or disregard specific problematic food cues or triggers using attention modification programs, according to a news release.

"Attentional bias is a long-studied psychological phenomenon," Kerri Boutelle, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, said in a statement. "We believe that there is a group of people who are inherently sensitive to food cues and, over time, eating in response to paying attention to food makes them pay even more attention. It's based on Pavlovian conditioning."

Boutelle added that attentional bias to food means that food grabs a person's attention. For example, if two people were in a room with potato chips on the table, the person with attentional bias would be paying attention to, or looking at, the chips and the bias would not really notice or pay attention to them.

Researchers investigated whether attention modification training might be another way to treat problematic eating and obesity in children. For the study, they recruited 24 overweight and obese children between the ages of 8 and 12 and split them into two groups.

One group underwent an attention modification program in which they watched pairs of words quickly flash upon a computer screen. One was a food word, such as "cake;" the other was a non-food word, such as "desk." After the words had flashed and disappeared, a letter appeared on-screen in the place of either the food word or the non-food word. The viewing child was asked to immediately press the right or left button associated with the letter's location.

"This is called 'implicit training' as it happens so fast that some people might not realize what is happening," said Boutelle. "The AMP trained attention away from food words because the letter always appeared in the spot of the non-food word while in the other group, the condition trained attention was split with the letter appearing half of the time in the food word location and half in the non-food word location."

Researchers said the two computer programs differentially affected eating in the overweight children after only one training session.  They said one session of their program decreased eating in obese children.

Boutelle said she hopes the pilot study will spawn larger and longer similar investigations, which could ultimately provide another means of addressing overeating and obesity.

"Assuming attentional bias training is effective in larger studies, it could be provided in the form of a computer game which could be a stand-alone program or it could potentially enhance their ability to stick to a diet by decreasing the attention paid to food," she said.