Abstract
Throughout our lives we develop a system that helps us navigate in a food environment. In a routine where we are constantly thinking about food and making choices, ranging from whether we actually want to eat, through selection of food category and portion size, to eventual consumption, it is worth highlighting that many of those microdecisions are made without full awareness. Focusing on the situations of having to make a choice among foods, we would mainly rely on two sources of information: that of the product’s intrinsic properties, and the additional information we get about it simultaneously (e.g., recommendations, or packaging information). However, most probably we have already consumed a similar product previously. Therefore, our brain will simulate the likely impact (hedonic and utilitarian) the product will have on us and, after experiencing it (moment of truth), will determine whether it is congruent with the image or schema we had about it, and if not, to some extent, it will accommodate, and that image will be adjusted. Now, certain products inherently trigger predominantly certain types of simulations (e.g., a cake triggers simulations related more to short-term effects and fruit more longer-term effects), which depending on our own goals will result in certain behavior. This chapter will discuss the process of mentally simulating and anticipating different stages of food consumption and will provide novel evidence on the effect this has when used as a strategy to steer food choices in a desirable way.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. Retrieved from http://barsaloulab.org/Online_Articles/2005-Barsalou-chap-situated_conceptualization.pdf
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639.
Booth, D. A. (1992). Integration of internal and external signals in intake control. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 51, 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1079/PNS19920006.
Cornil, Y., & Chandon, P. (2016). Pleasure as a substitute for size: How multisensory imagery can make people happier with smaller food portions. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(5), 847–864. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.14.0299.
Dickinson, A. (1985). Actions and habits: The development of Behavioural autonomy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 308(1135), 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1985.0010.
Förster, J., Liberman, N., & Friedman, R. S. (2007). Seven principles of goal activation: A systematic approach to distinguishing goal priming from priming of non-goal constructs. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868307303029.
Friston, K. (2005). A theory of cortical responses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 360, 815–836.
Gregorey, R. L. (1980). Perceptions as hypotheses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 290, 181–197.
Haasova, S., Elekes, B., Missbach, B., & Florack, B. (2016). Effects of imagined consumption and simulated eating movements on food intake: Thoughts about food are not always of advantage. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01691.
Higgs, S. (2002). Memory for recent eating and its influence on subsequent food intake. Appetite, 39, 159–166.
Higgs, S. (2008). Cognitive influences on food intake: The effects of manipulating memory for recent eating. Physiology & Behaviour, 94(5), 734–739.
Hohwy, J. (2007). Functional integration and the mind. Synthese, 159, 315–328.
Kahneman, D., & Snell, J. (1992). Predicting a change in taste: Do people know what they will like? Journal of Behavioural Decision Making, 5, 187–200.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty (pp. 201–208). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511809477.015.
Kappes, H. B., & Morewedge, C. K. (2016). Mental simulation as substitute for experience. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(7), 405–420. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12257.
Keesman, M., Aarts, H., Vermeent, S., Hafner, M., & Papies, E. K. (2016). Consumption simulations induce salivation to food cues. PLoS One, 11(11), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165449.
Kemps, E., & Tiggemann, M. (2013). Imagery and cravings. In Multisensory imagery (pp. 385–396). New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5879-1_20.
Lacey, S., & Lawson, R. (Eds.). (2013). Multisensory imagery. Springer Science & Business Media. consumption reduces actual consumption. Science (New York), 330(6010), 1530–1533. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1195701
Larson, J. S., Redden, J. P., & Elder, R. S. (2014). Satiation from sensory simulation: Evaluating foods decreases enjoyment of similar foods. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(2), 188–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2013.09.001.
Maehle, N., Iversen, N., Hem, L., & Otnes, C. (2015). Exploring consumer preferences for hedonic and utilitarian food attributes. British Food Journal., 34, 530. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJQRM-04-2015-0050.
May, J., Kavanagh, D. J., & Andrade, J. (2015). The elaborated intrusion theory of desire: A 10-year retrospective and implications for addiction treatments. Addictive Behaviors, 44, 29–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2014.09.016.
Missbach, B., Florack, A., Weissmann, L., & König, J. (2014). Mental imagery interventions reduce subsequent food intake only when self-regulatory resources are available. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01391.
Morewedge, C. K., Huh, Y. E., & Vosgerau, J. (2010). Thought for food: Imagined.
Muñoz-Vilches, N. C., van Trijp, H. C. M., & Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (submitted). Tell me what you imagine and I will tell you what you want: the effects of mental simulation on desire and food choice.
Muñoz-Vilches, N. C., van Trijp, H. C. M., & Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (2019). The impact of instructed mental simulation on wanting and choice between vice and virtue food products. Food Quality and Preference, 73, 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2018.11.010.
Papies, E. K. (2013). Tempting food words activate eating simulations. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00838.
Pelchat, M. L., Johnson, A., Chan, R., Valdez, J., & Ragland, J. D. (2004). Images of desire: Food-craving activation during fMRI. NeuroImage, 23, 1486–1493.
Petit, O., Basso, F., Merunka, D., Spence, C., Cheok, A. D., & Oullier, O. (2016). Pleasure and the control of food intake: An embodied cognition approach to consumer self-regulation. Psychology & Marketing, 30(6), 461–469. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.
Petit, O., Spence, C., Velasco, C., Woods, A. T., & Cheok, A. D. (2017). Changing the influence of portion size on consumer behavior via imagined consumption. Journal of Business Research, 75, 240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.07.021.
Petrova, P. K., & Cialdini, R. B. (2005). Fluency of consumption imagery and the backfire effects of imagery appeals. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(3), 442–452. https://doi.org/10.1086/497556.
Piqueras-Fiszman, B., & Jaeger, S. R. (2016). The incidental influence of memories of past eating occasions on consumers’ emotional responses to food and food-related behaviours. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 943. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00943.
Piqueras-Fiszman, B., & Spence, C. (2015). Sensory expectations based on product- extrinsic food cues: An interdisciplinary review of the empirical evidence and theoretical accounts. Food Quality and Preference, 40A, 165–179.
Robinson, E., Blissett, J., & Higgs, S. (2011). Recall of vegetable eating affects future predicted enjoyment and choice of vegetables. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 111, 1543–1548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2011.07.012.
Robinson, E., Blissett, J., & Higgs, S. (2012). Changing memory of food enjoyment to increase food liking, choice and intake. British Journal of Nutrition, 108, 1505–1510. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007114511007021.
Rozin, P., Hanko, K., & Durlach, P. (2006). Self-prediction of hedonic trajectories for repeated use of body products and foods: Poor performance, not improved by a full generation of experience. Appetite, 46, 297–303.
Schumacher, S., Kemps, E., & Tiggemann, M. (2017). Acceptance- and imagery-based strategies can reduce chocolate cravings: A test of the elaborated-intrusion theory of desire. Appetite, 113, 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2017.02.012.
Spence, C. (2016). The neuroscience of flavor. In Multisensory flavor perception (pp. 235–248). Woodhead Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100350-3.00012-2.
Steptoe, A., Pollard, T. M., & Wardle, J. (1995). Development of a measure of the motives underlying the selection of food: The food choice questionnaire. Appetite, 25, 267–284. https://doi.org/10.1006/appe.1995.0061.
Taylor, S. E., Pham, L. B., Rivkin, I. D., & Armor, D. A. (1998). Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping. American Psychologist, 53(4), 429–439. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.53.4.429.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110(3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.3.403.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9.
van der Laan, L. N., Papies, E. K., Hooge, I. T. C., & Smeets, P. A. M. (2017). Goal- directed visual attention drives health goal priming: An eye-tracking experiment. Health Psychology, 36(1), 82–90. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000410.
Vartanian, L. R., Chen, W. H., Reily, N. M., & Castel, A. D. (2016). The parallel impact of episodic memory and episodic future thinking on food intake. Appetite, 101, 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2016.02.149.
Xie, H., Minton, E. A., & Kahle, L. R. (2016). Cake or fruit? Influencing healthy food choice through the interaction of automatic and instructed mental simulation. Marketing Letters, 27, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-016-9412-3.
Yeomans, M. R., McCrickerd, K., Brunstrom, J. M., & Chambers, L. (2014). Effects of repeated consumption on sensory–enhanced satiety. British Journal of Nutrition, 111, 1137–1144.
Zhao, M., Hoeffler, S., & Zauberman, G. (2011). Mental simulation and product evaluation: The affective and cognitive dimensions of process versus outcome simulation. Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 48(5), 827–839. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.5.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (2020). The Psychology of Food Choice: Anticipation and Mental Simulation. In: Meiselman, H. (eds) Handbook of Eating and Drinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14504-0_170
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14504-0_170
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14503-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14504-0
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences