March Jennifer, Gluth Sebastian
Department of Psychology and Hamburg Center of Neuroscience, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Elife. 2025 Jul 2;13:RP103736. doi: 10.7554/eLife.103736.
Hunger is a biological drive which can promote unhealthy dietary decisions. Yet, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect, and in particular the interactive role of attention and choice processes, remain elusive. To address this gap, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment, in which 70 participants completed a multi-attribute food choice task in hungry and sated states. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, participants' preference for tasty over healthy food items was amplified by hunger. Attention mediated this influence of hunger, as hungry participants focused more on tasty options, leading them to make less healthy decisions. Rigorous model comparisons revealed that an extension of the recently proposed multi-attribute attentional drift diffusion model best explained choice and response times. According to this model, hunger did not only increase the relative taste compared to health weight, but it also increased the fixation-related discounting of health but not taste information. Our results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms underlying unhealthy dietary decisions under hunger are characterized by a nuanced interplay between attention and the significance assigned to the options' underlying attributes.
饥饿是一种生物驱动力，它会促使人们做出不健康的饮食选择。然而，这种影响背后的认知机制，尤其是注意力和选择过程的交互作用，仍然难以捉摸。为了填补这一空白，我们进行了一项眼动追踪实验，70名参与者在饥饿和饱腹状态下完成了一项多属性食物选择任务。正如我们预先注册的假设所证实的那样，饥饿放大了参与者对美味食物而非健康食物的偏好。注意力介导了饥饿的这种影响，因为饥饿的参与者更多地关注美味的选项，从而导致他们做出不太健康的决定。严格的模型比较表明，最近提出的多属性注意力漂移扩散模型的扩展最能解释选择和反应时间。根据这个模型，饥饿不仅增加了相对于健康权重的相对味道，还增加了与注视相关的对健康信息而非味道信息的折扣。我们的结果表明，饥饿状态下不健康饮食决策背后的认知机制的特点是注意力与赋予选项潜在属性的重要性之间存在细微的相互作用。
