The effect of nutritional labels on the facilitation of food image detection

The abundance of reduced-energy food products in modern society means consumers are frequently exposed to foods with similar sensory characteristics but differing nutritional values (e.g., sugar or sugar-free beverages). This inconsistency between sensory cues and nutritional content has been suggested to impair eating regulatory mechanisms such as flavor-nutrient learning and conditioned satiety. This research aimed to examine whether nutritional labels can serve as a tool to counteract this presumed impairment. Specifically, we investigated whether nutritional labels could modulate the previously observed attentional bias toward food stimuli. Across two experiments, we explored (1) whether attentional bias is influenced by the nutritional value of the food (Experiment 1) and (2) whether this bias can be modulated by a pre-feeding phase in which participants consumed a food item presented either with or without a nutritional label that signaled high or low caloric content (Experiment 2). Our results replicate the finding that attentional biases toward foods are modulated by their nutritional value. However, the effect of nutrition labels remains inconclusive. Future research should explore whether using this methodology with alternative nutritional label formats would be more effective. • Food stimuli capture attention over neutral stimuli in visual search tasks. • This attentional caption is modulated by the type of food stimuli and physiological state. • Nutritional labels were not able to modulate the physiological state of participants. • Nutritional labels did not mimic Flavor-Nutrient Learning or Conditioned Satiety.