Identifying the cognitive mechanisms that drive real-world food choices

Abstract

In everyday life, humans are bombarded with opportunities for food consumption, from supermarkets and cafeterias to gas-stations and fast-food outlets. Given rising rates of obesity worldwide, there has been intense scientific effort to understand the cognitive and neural basis of human decision-making and the factors that influence dietary choice. Yet, there has been a fundamental disconnect between the way foods are encountered in the laboratory versus in the natural world. In the laboratory, scientists have studied responses to artificial stimuli in the form of pictures or images of foods, rather than studying responses to actual real-world foods. The overarching assumption has been that images are an appropriate proxy for real objects to characterize human behavior and neural coding. However, images are abstract representations of real foods that convey impoverished information about egocentric distance, size, and weight, and they do not afford grasping or consumption. Here, I conducted two studies that explored whether, and how, real foods influence decision-making differently to food images. The rationale for the research is that studying responses to naturalistic stimuli will expand our understanding of real-world decision-making and dietary choice, and potentially improve public health approaches to obesity.