Category-specific general Pavlovian-instrumental transfer

J. Mahlberg, Gabrielle Weidemann

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Modern living is characterized by easy access to highly palatable energy-dense foods. Environmental cues associated with palatable foods increase seeking of those foods (specific transfer) and other palatable foods (general transfer). We conducted a series of studies testing the boundaries of food cue-reactivity by evaluating the impact of broader flavor associations (i.e. saltiness, sweetness) in eliciting general transfer effects. Experiment 1 was an online experiment with fictive rewards that tested if two actions associated with different food rewards (chip and chocolate points) could be provoked by images of other foods that were either similar or distinct in flavor from the foods associated with these instrumental actions. We observed that response excitation was only elicited by similarly flavored food cues, whereas distinctly flavored food cues inhibited response rates relative to control cues. Experiment 2 confirmed this observation in a classroom setting where real food rewards were contingent on task performance. Experiment 3 was an online study that further confirmed the reliability of the effects with a well powered sample. There were moderate-to-strong associations between specific and general transfer effects across all studies, suggesting overlapping cognitive processes are responsible for both transfer effects. These data improve the mechanistic understanding of how broad category associations can moderate the impact of food cues on food choices. This knowledge could be helpful for improving the precision of psychological interventions that seek to mitigate the impact of food cue-reactivity.
Original languageEnglish
Article number107640
Number of pages10
JournalAppetite
Volume202
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2024 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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