Many people find it hard to change their dietary choices. Food choice often occurs impulsively, without deliberation, and it has been unclear whether impulsive food choice can be experimentally created. Across 3 exploratory and 2 confirmatory preregistered experiments we examined whether impulsive food choice can be trained. Participants were cued to make motor responses upon the presentation of, among others, healthy and sustainable food items. They subsequently selected these food items more often for actual consumption when they needed to make their choices impulsively as a result of time pressure. This effect disappeared when participants were asked to think about their choices, merely received more time to make their choices, or when choosing required attention to alternatives. Participants preferred high to low valued food items under time pressure and without time pressure, suggesting that the impulsive choices reflect valid preferences. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to train impulsive choices for food items while leaving deliberative choices for these items unaffected, and connect research on attention training to dual-process theories of decision making. The present research suggests that attention training may lead to behavioral change only when people behave impulsively.
#1Zhang Chen(Radboud University Nijmegen)H-Index: 7
#2Harm Veling(Radboud University Nijmegen)H-Index: 23
Last. Rob W. Holland(Radboud University Nijmegen)H-Index: 33
view all 4 authors...
In a series of 6 experiments (5 preregistered), we examined how not responding to appetitive stimuli causes devaluation. To examine this question, a go/no-go task was employed in which appetitive stimuli were consistently associated with cues to respond (go stimuli), or with cues to not respond (either no-go cues or the absence of cues; no-go stimuli). Change in evaluations of no-go stimuli was compared to change in evaluations of both go stimuli and of stimuli not presented in the task (untrain...
Last. Tom Schonberg(TAU: Tel Aviv University)H-Index: 16
view all 6 authors...
Cue-approach training has been shown to effectively shift choices for snack food items by associating a cued button-press motor response to particular food items. Furthermore, attention is biased toward previously cued items, even when the cued item is not chosen for real consumption during a choice phase. However, the exact mechanism by which preferences shift during cue-approach training is not entirely clear. In three experiments, we shed light on the possible underlying mechanisms at play du...
The majority of adults in the UK and US are overweight or obese due to multiple factors including excess energy intake. Training people to inhibit simple motor responses (key presses) to high-energy density food pictures reduces intake in laboratory studies. We examined whether online response inhibition training reduced real-world food consumption and weight in a community sample of adults who were predominantly overweight or obese (N = 83). Participants were allocated in a randomised, double-b...
‘Impulsivity’ refers to a range of behaviours including preference for immediate reward (temporal-impulsivity) and the tendency to make premature decisions (reflection-impulsivity) and responses (motor-impulsivity). The current study aimed to examine how different behavioural and self-report measurements of impulsivity can be categorised into distinct subtypes. Exploratory factor analysis using full information maximum likelihood was conducted on 10 behavioural and 1 self-report measure of impul...
#1David Tilman(UMN: University of Minnesota)H-Index: 161
#2Michael Clark(UMN: University of Minnesota)H-Index: 17
Diets link environmental and human health. Rising incomes and urbanization are driving a global dietary transition in which traditional diets are replaced by diets higher in refined sugars, refined fats, oils and meats. By 2050 these dietary trends, if unchecked, would be a major contributor to an estimated 80 per cent increase in global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions from food production and to global land clearing. Moreover, these dietary shifts are greatly increasing the incidence of t...
No scientific conclusion follows automatically from a statistically non-significant result, yet people routinely use non-significant results to guide conclusions about the status of theories (or the effectiveness of practices). To know whether a non-significant result counts against a theory, or if it just indicates data insensitivity, researchers must use one of: power, intervals (such as confidence or credibility intervals), or else an indicator of the relative evidence for one theory over ano...
It is believed that choice behavior reveals the underlying value of goods. The subjective values of stimuli can be changed through reward-based learning mechanisms as well as by modifying the description of the decision problem, but it has yet to be shown that preferences can be manipulated by perturbing intrinsic values of individual items. Here we show that the value of food items can be modulated by the concurrent presentation of an irrelevant auditory cue to which subjects must make a simple...
There is emerging evidence that attentional biases are related to the consumption of substances such as alcohol and tobacco, and that attentional bias modification can reduce unwanted consumption of these substances. We present evidence for the first time to our knowledge that the same logical argument applies in the food and eating domain. We conducted two experiments that used a modified dot probe paradigm to train undergraduate women to direct their attention toward (“attend”) or away from (“...
#1Antonio Rangel(California Institute of Technology)H-Index: 69
To advance our understanding of how the brain makes food decisions, it is essential to combine knowledge from two fields that have not yet been well integrated: the neuro-computational basis of decision-making and the homeostatic regulators of feeding. This Review integrates these two literatures from a neuro-computational perspective, with an emphasis in describing the variables computed by different neural systems and how they affect dietary choice. We highlight what is unique about feeding de...
The present study explores whether presenting specific palatable foods in close temporal proximity of stop signals in a go/no-go task decreases subsequent evaluations of such foods among participants with a relatively high appetite. Furthermore, we tested whether any decreased evaluations could mediate subsequent food choice. Participants first received a go/no-go task in which palatable foods were consistently linked to go cues or no-go cues within participants. Next, evaluation of the palatabl...
#2Akram Bakkour(U of C: University of Chicago)H-Index: 15
Last. Tom Schonberg(TAU: Tel Aviv University)H-Index: 16
view all 5 authors...
It is commonly assumed that memories contribute to value-based decisions. Nevertheless, most theories of value-based decision-making do not account for memory influences on choice. Recently, new interest has emerged in the interactions between these two fundamental processes, mainly using reinforcement-based paradigms. Here, we aimed to study the role memory processes play in preference change following the nonreinforced cue-approach training (CAT) paradigm. In CAT, the mere association of cued ...
Inhibitory control training effects on behaviour (e.g. ‘healthier’ food choices) can be driven by changes in affective evaluations of trained stimuli, and theoretical models indicate that changes i...
Abstract null null Inhibitory control training has recently been used as an intervention to aid healthy eating and encourage weight loss. The aim of this pre-registered study was to explore the effects of training on food liking, food consumption and weight loss in a large (n = 366), predominantly healthy-weight sample. Participants received four training sessions within a week, in which they had to inhibit their responses to either energy-dense foods (active group) or non-food images (control g...
Last. Lucas Spierer(University of Fribourg)H-Index: 23
view all 4 authors...
Recent lines of research suggest that repeated executive control of motor responses to food items modifies their perceived value and in turn their consumption. Cognitive interventions involving the practice of motor control and attentional tasks have thus been advanced as potential approach to improve eating habits. Yet, their efficacy remains debated, notably due to a lack of proper control for the effects of expectations. We examined whether a one-month intervention combining the practice of G...
Food-specific inhibition training (FSIT) is a computerised task requiring response inhibition to energy-dense foods within a reaction-time game. Previous work indicates that FSIT can increase the number of healthy foods (relative to energy-dense foods) children choose, and decrease calories consumed from sweets and chocolate. Across two studies, we explored the impact of FSIT variations (e.g., different response signals, different delivery modes) on children’s food choices within a time-limited ...
Last. Rob W. Holland(Radboud University Nijmegen)H-Index: 33
view all 6 authors...
Abstract Behavior toward appetitive stimuli can be changed by motor response training procedures in which participants approach or respond to some stimuli and avoid or inhibit behavior to other stimuli. There is discussion in the literature whether effects are different when participants approach versus avoid stimuli during approach-avoidance training compared to when they respond versus not respond to stimuli during go/no-go training. Here, we directly compared effects of approach-avoidance tra...
Obesity and diet-related health problems are complex, multi-factorial issues. Individual food choices are shaped by the wider context, and food environment level change is needed to support individual behaviour change. The food service sector can play an integral role, changing aspects of the food environment and contributing to improved consumer health. This systematic review aimed to analyse food service schemes that aimed to improve consumer health. Ten electronic databases were systematicall...
Last. Toni Cunillera(University of Barcelona)H-Index: 21
view all 3 authors...
When food cues appear in a visual context, such information is likely to influence eating behavior by enhancing attention for food cues. We investigated whether active but task-irrelevant information could modulate the attentional bias for food stimuli using a novel paradigm in which participants were purposely deceived by being enrolled in a memory experiment. A set of images were first held in working memory and then used as task-irrelevant distractors in a subsequent single target rapid seria...
In this Registered Report, we assessed the utility of the affective priming paradigm (APP) as an indirect measure of food attitudes and related choice behaviour in two separate cohorts. Participants undertook a speeded evaluative categorization task in which target words were preceded by food primes that differed in terms of affective congruence with the target, explicit liking (most liked or least liked), and healthiness (healthy or unhealthy). Non-food priming effects were tested as a manipula...
The behavior of vegetable consumption in the context of sustainable development has become a point of interest. Determining the barriers and the drivers for developing a sustainable consumption pattern, including food, should be a priority for every nation, as so to be able to design targeted food policies that would contribute to this development. Reducing the pressure on resources by diminishing meat consumption and increasing vegetable consumption is one of the global directions that should b...
