2011 Volume 15 Issue 2 Pages 190-198
[Purpose] It is known that the anticipatory stage including recognizing and understanding food plays an important role in the feeding process. The aim of this study was to clarify the effects of cognition in the anticipatory stage of feeding, therefore, the relationship between sensory input such as visual and verbal information and the food-capturing motion was investigated.
[Methods] The subjects were 20 healthy young adults (10 males and 10 females). The feeding tasks observed were the following: (1) with their eyes closed and being given no information about the food, (2) with their eyes closed and being told what they were about to eat, (3) with their eyes open and being told what they were about to eat, and (4) self-feeding with their eyes open and being told what they were about to eat.
In this research, time of mouth-opening, position of spoon, maximum mouth-opening and length of spoon were measured on a personal computer three-dimensionally.
[Results] Firstly, the measurement of lip motion indicated that the subjects whose eyes had been kept closed with no auditory information, under condition 1, began to open their mouths 0.3 seconds after the spoon reached their lower lips on average. Meanwhile, the participants under conditions 2 and 3 began to open their mouths earlier than the other conditions. The average time of mouth-opening was the shortest in subjects under condition 4.
Secondly, the measured position of the spoon tended to be farther in condition 4 than the other conditions. In contrast, there was no significant difference between the results of the items under conditions 1 and 2.
Thirdly, though maximum mouth-opening showed little differences among the four conditions, the result of condition 4 tended to be greater than that of conditions 1 and 2.
Finally, the mean length of spoon was greater for the subjects under conditions 1 and 2, whereas the personal coefficient of variance was dramatically greater under conditions 3 and 4.
[Conclusion] This study suggests that a limitation on sensory information can affect prefeeding motions, and hence auditory information may alleviate the influence by offsetting the loss of visual information.
