Effect of resistance exercise on attentional bias toward food in overweight female college students: An event-related potential study.

Background: Attentional bias toward high-energy foods may increase appetite, leading to overconsumption and overweight. Physical exercise has been shown to reduce such bias, however, limited research has investigated its effects and underlying mechanisms.The present study aimed to explore whether acute resistance exercise modulates attentional bias toward food-related stimuli among young overweight women. Methods: Forty-three overweight female college students were randomly assigned to either an experimental group ( Results: Compared to the control group, the exercise group had a significantly lower attentional engagement index for the low-energy food cues and significantly shorter peak latency of N2 and P3 during the dot probe task. Within the experimental group, the N2 peak amplitude was significantly lower in the high-energy vs. low-energy condition when there were incongruent food cues. Conclusion: These results indicate that the onset of attentional engagement and attentional orientation toward food cues occurred significantly earlier after resistance exercise. This study provides novel insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying resistance exercise-induced modulations of attentional processing of food-related stimuli in overweight females, offering both theoretical contributions to exercise cognition and practical implications for weight management interventions.