Effect of Visual Stimuli on Diet Choices

January 2020 – May 2020

Abstract

We examined the effect of visual stimuli of food on the diet choices of 159 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants. Stimuli consisted of either unhealthy or healthy food pictures. We used paired t-tests to analyze both conditions. We found that in both exposure conditions, participants’ choices were significantly affected by the stimuli. A third paired t-test found no significant difference between the effect sizes of both conditions. However, there was a higher effect size in the unhealthy food stimuli condition, in which participants’ choices became more unhealthy. In the healthy food stimuli condition, participants’ choices also became more unhealthy but to a lesser degree. We theorize that exposure to food stimuli of any kind not only increases cognitive salience of food, but primes participants to crave the foods they typically eat, which may correlate with social, cultural, and economic background. Further research is needed to examine the relationship between one’s background and their diet choices after exposure to food stimuli.