Huge thanks to the editor of eLife and the reviewers helpful comments, which further improved our manuscript, to my supervisor Sebastian Gluth, the amazing people from the Cognitive Modelling and Decision Neuroscience Lab @uni-hamburg.de

Make sure to check out our supplementary materials in which we analyse other attributes underlying food choice (wanting, caloric content and nutritional score) and show the results of alternative decision models. Overall, these analyses provide further evidence for our conclusions.

Together, our findings suggest that the effect of hunger state on the cognitive processes underlying dietary decision are characterised by a nuanced interplay of attention and the importance assigned to the options' underlying attributes. Finally, we discuss important implications of our findings.

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 .

Hunger can promote unhealthy dietary decisions which increase energy intake and weight. In the paper, we set out to shed light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying food choice, by investigating the effect of hunger on attention and valuation processes in multi-attribute dietary choice.