Scientists discover new reason why we make food choices

Australian psychologists have discovered how our perceptions of the food we just saw can influence eating decisions, with potential implications for food marketing, restaurant menus and treatments for eating disorders.

“What you perceive at the moment is not independent,” said Professor David Alais of the University of Sydney, lead author of the study. News week. “It’s shaped by what you just saw.”

Psychologists conducted an experiment on 600 people who were asked to rate the attractiveness – and guess the calorie content – ​​of a series of images of food.

“We presented sequences of food images, one after the other,” Alais explained. “We had hundreds of images, and participants simply had to move a slider and click to rate its attractiveness (or caloric value).

“And then the point is to analyze their responses and see if each response is independent or if there’s a carryover from what you’ve seen previously,” he said.

Alais and his team discovered that there was a carryover effect, called serial addiction, in which the order of the images seemed to affect how a person felt about each one.

“What we found was that if you saw a food that you rated highly in terms of attractiveness or calories, your next rating was higher than it otherwise would have been,” Alais said.

“And it works both ways. So if you’ve already seen a food that you rated low, the next food will be rated below its average rating because it follows a food that you rated low,” a- he declared.

People tend to assume that attractive things look better if compared to something disgusting, Alais said, but that’s not the case. Instead, feeling positively about one thing tends to make us feel more positive about the next.

He explained that this effect is not conscious but sensory and connected to a part of the brain, which psychologists have recently discovered, which seems to specialize in the way we perceive food.

“It’s automatic, it happens,” Alais said. “It’s not at the level of your reflective mind, it’s at the level of how you feel things. Just like the wind blows and you feel it on your skin – it’s automatic – or that color red flashes and you perceive red, it is automatic and sensory.

He said it could affect how we make choices on delivery apps or digital restaurant menus, where consumers are faced with food decisions based on many images of food.

“We make hundreds of food decisions every day, and it’s often in this format that we see a lot of images,” Alais said. “If you scan a QR code at a bar and flip through all the pictures of food, you get them one after the other.

“One of them will please more than another. Well, maybe it’s not because you particularly want that food. It could have been pushed higher (in your opinion) by a previous image” , he said.

With further research, this could also be used in the treatment of eating disorders, to influence how people with problematic eating behaviors feel about foods, Alais said.

“Therapists use cognitive-behavioral strategies to help people change their behaviors and food choices, and here’s another one,” he said, describing it as “a simple sensory process” that could help reshape food thinking to help people struggling with overeating or undereating behaviors. .

It could also impact the marketing, retail and hospitality sectors, Alais said. For example, with advertisements, wine tastings, perfumes and restaurant menus, where multiple sensory experiences take place in a sequence and “there has to be an optimal order,” he said.

With information about this serial addiction effect, restaurateurs could organize their menus in a way that encourages their customers to have a more positive attitude toward more profitable food products, for example.

Alais was joined in the research by Professor Thomas Carlson from the University of Sydney and Professor David Burr from the University of Florence. The study was published in the journal Current biology and was funded by the Australian Research Council and the European Research Council.

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Reference

Alais, D., Burr, D., Carlson, T.A. (2024). Positive serial dependence in ratings of food images for attractiveness and calories, Current Biology 34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.09.012