Lovely to have been part of this inspiring meeting #EGPROC2025
at this stunning venue @jadatascience.bsky.social

Extensive model comparison revealed that this model demonstrated the best quantitative and qualitative fit suggesting that hunger alters the valuation process by a) increasing the relative importance of tastiness and b) shifting how attention modulates the consideration of nutritional information.

To better understand the mechanisms behind these effects, we extended the recently proposed multi-attribute attentional drift diffusion model by differentiating between the parameter discounting the non-looked-upon attribute (taste and health).

Our eye-tracking analyses revealed that participants spent more time on the chosen option and overall more time on food images compared to nutritional score, which was even more pronounced under hunger. A mediation analysis established that attention mediated the effect of hunger on choice.

We manipulated hunger successfully and show that participants prefer tasty over health food items in general and particularly when hungry. Moreover, tasty choices were faster than healthy ones.

We conducted a within-subject eye-tracking experiment, in which 70 participants completed a multi-attribute food choice task in hungry and sated states. In both conditions, participants fasted overnight. In the sated condition, they received a protein shake matched to their daily caloric needs .