Perceptual salience influences food choices independently of health and taste preferences

Abstract

Background: Making decisions about food is a critical part of everyday life and a principal concern for a number of public health issues. Yet, the mechanisms involved in how people decide what to eat are not yet fully understood. Here, we examined the role of visual attention in healthy eating intentions and choices. We conducted two-alternative forced choice tests of competing food stimuli that paired healthy and unhealthy foods that varied in taste preference. We manipulated their perceptual salience such that, in some cases, one food item was more perceptually salient than the other. In addition, we manipulated the cognitive load and time pressure to test the generalizability of the salience effect.

Results: Manipulating salience had a powerful effect on choice in all situations; even when an unhealthy but tastier food was presented as an alternative, healthy food options were selected more often when they were perceptually salient. Moreover, in a second experiment, food choices on one trial impacted food choices on subsequent trials; when a participant chose the healthy option, they were more likely to choose a healthy option again on the next trial. Furthermore, robust effects of salience on food choice were observed across situations of high cognitive load and time pressure.

Conclusions: These results have implications both for understanding the mechanisms of food-related decision-making and for implementing interventions that might make it easier for people to make healthy eating choices.

Keywords: Attention; Health; Taste preference; Visual salience.

Fig. 1

Sample image of a two-alternative forced choice test. In this trial, the healthy food stimulus is salient

Fig. 2

Experiment 1.1. Visual saliency bias in two-alternative forced choice tests on MTurk. Selection of the healthy stimulus varied by main effects of salience type and taste rating. Error bars reflect the standard error of the mean

Fig. 3

Experiment 1.2. Visual saliency bias in two-alternative forced choice tests with one reinforced choice. Selection of the healthy stimulus varied by salience type and taste rating. Error bars reflect the standard error of the mean

Fig. 4

Visual saliency bias in two-alternative forced choice tests with one reinforced choice. Selection of the healthy stimulus varied by salience type and taste rating. We also varied the conditions under which participants made their decisions by inducing cognitive load or enforcing a reaction time deadline. Error bars reflect the standard error of the mean. RT reaction time