ArticleeLife2025
Hunger shifts attention and attribute weighting in dietary choice.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Impact of Mindfulness Interventions upon Visual Attention and Attentional Bias Towards Food Cues: A Systematic Review.Nutrients · 2025Pooled it
- Domain-specific effects of hunger on attention and choice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The neural pathways of change: an fMRI study of the effects of behavioral change suggestions on value-based dietary decision-making.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Hunger is a biological drive which can promote unhealthy dietary decisions. Yet, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect, and in particular the interactive role of attention and choice processes, remain elusive. To address this gap, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment, in which 70 participants completed a multi-attribute food choice task in hungry and sated states. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, participants' preference for tasty over healthy food items was amplified by hunger. Attention mediated this influence of hunger, as hungry participants focused more on tasty options, leading them to make less healthy decisions. Rigorous model comparisons revealed that an extension of the recently proposed multi-attribute attentional drift diffusion model best explained choice and response times. According to this model, hunger did not only increase the relative taste compared to health weight, but it also increased the fixation-related discounting of health but not taste information. Our results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms underlying unhealthy dietary decisions under hunger are characterized by a nuanced interplay between attention and the significance assigned to the options' underlying attributes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.