Training impulsive choices for healthy and sustainable food.

Abstract

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. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Cue-Approach Task as a General Mechanism for Long-Term Non-Reinforced Behavioral Change<strong></strong>

“…In experiments with snack-food items (Experiments 5 and 6), participants underwent an auction task based on the Becker DeGroot Marschak (BDM) 38 auction procedure, to obtain participants' willingness to pay, similarly to previous CAT studies [11][12][13][14][15] . Prior to their participation in the experiment, subjects were asked to fast for at least four hours.…”

“…We also predicted that this behavioral change would be more robust for high-value items (items for which a participant had a higher pre-existing preference) than for low-value items, as reported in most studies with CAT 11,12,15 , though not all of them 13 .…”

“…It was also found that the CAT effect induces preference changes beyond the hand motor circuit itself, relying on a study that trained participants with the button press, whereas choices during probe were made using the eye gaze 12 . Veling et al 13 extended the range of consumable items for non-reinforced change to fruits and vegetables, and also found that the effect requires a time-restricted response.…”

“…We assessed the long-term effect following a period of one-month (Experiment 7), two-months (Experiments 5 and 6), four-months (Experiment 2) and six-months (Experiment 8) after training. Demonstrating that the behavioral change effect is durable over a long period of time could point to its underlying mechanism that putatively effects the low-level representation of the items 29 , as well as potential applicability in inducing long-term change.Based on previous findings [11][12][13][14][15] , we hypothesized that CAT would result in increased preferences for Go items (i.e. items that were previously associated with a cue and a response)…”

“…Based on previous findings [11][12][13][14][15] , we hypothesized that CAT would result in increased preferences for Go items (i.e. items that were previously associated with a cue and a response)…”