Force4Change: Manipulating response effort to modify diet

Many people struggle to avoid eating high-calorie foods despite having strong dietary goals. If the usual methods fail, what is to be done? Cognitive bias modification (CBM) seek to change maladaptive behavior by influencing the underlying cognitive biases that drive it. CBM methods are not always able to affect actual behavior, prompting need for further innovation. One potential avenue is the manipulation of response effort: since our body is inclined to automatically prefer low-effort movements, could behavior be biased away from unhealthy choices by linking unhealthy foods to high- effort movements? We will therefore seek to change food cravings and consumption, both in the lab and in daily life, with a training that associates unhealthy food images with high response effort, and healthy food images with low response effort. As a first step, we will develop a quick decision task in which participants respond to food pictures by moving a robotic arm, with some movement directions more difficult than others due to resistance exerted by the robotic arm. After a first lab-based investigation of this methodology, we will let participants will regularly perform this training and report their consumption of healthy and unhealthy foods for a month. If successful in changing eating behavior, we will transform this new training into a smartphone app that can be administered anywhere and without expensive equipment.

No additional funding sources recorded.