Craving healthy foods?! How sensory appeals increase appetitive motivational processing of healthy foods in adolescents

The study examined how sensory appeal characteristics promoting fruits and vegetables capture attention, emotion, and memory formation, indicative of approach motivational processing. Grounded in biopsychological and communication science frameworks such as evolutionary theories, information-processing, LC4MP, and the dimensional emotion theory, two within-subjects experiments investigated how adolescents process pronutritional images appealing to the senses. Study 1 (N = 58, aged 12-18, 54% female) examined how sensory cues broke through the clutter of promotional media, attracting attentional selection, arousal and affect. Study 2 (N = 165, aged 12-18, 53% female) explored whether sensory appeal characteristics further directed the attention and mental resources toward processing the core healthy foods of fruits and vegetables. Eye-tracking provided an assessment of visual attentional focus and recognition memory indicated encoding efficiency. As hypothesized, core nutritious foods became noticeable, highly arousing, and memorable stimuli with adaptive significance to the organism when portrayed as enjoyable and ripe, through hedonic and palatability appeals. Sensory cues increased adolescents' attentional selection and positive emotions to the pronutritional images, but also attracted visual focus and high memory formation of the fruits and vegetables. Health communication practice should take advantage of these results and promote core healthy foods through hedonic and visual food palatability appeals.