Applying Optimal Foraging to Young Adult Decision-Making after Food Advertising Exposure

This study combined theory from the fields of communication, behavioral ecology, and ecological psychology to examine how relevant factors about food influence the timing and trajectory of our decision-making after exposure to food advertisements. Young healthy adult participants (N = 108) completed a forced-choice, speeded decision-making latency task before and after viewing a set of advertisements. Results suggested that participants were more appetitively motivated by more energy-dense foods (i.e., higher calorie per gram) using direct food cues (i.e., were directly available to the senses, were visible), but after exposure to advertisements, this predisposition was less pronounced. Advertisement food cues were also important in decision-making, especially in coalition with the food cues used in the decision-making task stimuli. This study supports an optimal foraging perspective being expanded to human behavioral contexts in a modern landscape. Food advertising and packaging cues interacted with energy density level of food to provide information relevant to biological imperatives, which significantly altered food consumption decisions.