| Summary: | Every day, people
struggle to make healthy eating decisions. Nutrition labels have been used to
help people properly balance the tradeoff between healthiness and taste, but
research suggests that these labels vary in their effectiveness. Here, we
investigated the cognitive mechanism underlying value-based decisions with
nutrition labels as modulators of value. More specifically, we used a binary
decision task between products along with two different nutrition labels to
examine how salient, color-coded labels, compared to purely information-based
labels, alter the choice process. Using drift-diffusion modeling, we
investigated whether color-coded labels alter the valuation process, or whether
they induce a simple stimulus-response association consistent with the
traffic-light colors irrespective of the features of the item, which would
manifest in a starting point bias in the model. We show that color-coded labels
significantly increased healthy choices by increasing the rate of preference
formation (drift rate) towards healthier options without altering the starting
point. Salient labels increased the sensitivity to health and decreased the
weight on taste, indicating that the integration of health and taste attributes
during the choice process is sensitive to how information is displayed. Salient
labels proved to be more effective in altering the valuation process towards
healthier, goal-directed decisions.
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