A new study is examining whether marketing food in the environment, such as supermarket, television and roadside advertising, are contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Known as food cues in advertising, previous studies have indicated that overweight people have more selective attention for food cues and spent more time focusing on them.
Psychology PhD student Karina Rune from the University of the Sunshine Coast plans to compare the eating habits of overweight people with their "attentional biases" - the type of attention they paid to various food cues.
"For example, you could be driving down the highway and see a road sign for a burger and you attend to that food cue. It could also be just the use of words as well, or even smells," Ms Rune said.
"Basically it's looking into why people overeat. So we're trying to find a distinction between why normal weight people attend to these food cues and the way overweight or obese people might attend to these food cues."
Ms Rune says the research indicates that if an overweight or obese person sees something in the environment to do with food, it might stimulate hunger or the feeling of needing to eat.
"Therefore, they go out and eat, whereas normal weight people will not pay so much attention to the cue and will not have the need to eat."
Testing the "attentional biases" theory
A computer program will be used to test people's reactions to food cues.
"We look at how overweight people, in comparison to normal weight people, attend to food items on a computer screen and how they react to those food items," Ms Rune said.
Apparently, it's all to do with the reaction time in identifying food items.
"You have a screen of pictures, some to do with food and some unrelated images," Ms Rune said.
"You compare what people attend to ...so you could have a picture of a bird and also a picture of food. An image will disappear from the screen and a cross appears in either of the two spots and overweight people would indicate the food spot quicker than compared to normal weight people."
Ms Rune says this would prove overweight or obese people have a "greater attention force" that occurs outside of their awareness.
"It means overweight people will attend to anything to do with food on an unconscious level, immediately and quickly," she said.
"Normal weight people don't have that attention towards food."
A healthier future
Ms Rune says her team will apply research that's already been undertaken with anxiety to see if it's the same case with food. She will also look at what might stop people overeating.
"Firstly, we can modify our environment. Everyone will know that 20-30 years ago we had a lot of advertising for cigarettes until people realised that it increased the number of people smoking," Ms Rune said.
"It's the same thing with advertising with food. We should be more aware of how we advertise food and what types of food we advertise.
"Secondly, we can also try and modify how people look at food cues. Again relating it back to anxiety, research has shown that if you teach people who are afraid of spiders to not attend to spiders in their environment they're less likely to be anxious.
"It's called an attentional biases modification program. Where basically you try and teach, for example with food, overweight people to not attend to food cues in their environment.
"It's training done on a computer. It sounds quite artificial, but relating it back to others kinds of research, it's actually found to be very effective."
Ms Rune says her findings won't provide a cure for obesity.
"There are lots of different reasons why people have excess weight, but this is just one aspect of a multifaceted approach," she said.
"Yes this may help some people, but not necessarily all people."