Domain-specific effects of hunger on attention and choice

Abstract

Abstract Hunger leads to less healthy food choices, but its effect on decision-making in non-food domains is less clear. To close this gap, we investigated to what extent hunger state affected choice across domains by examining attentional patterns and cognitive mechanisms underlying decision-making across different domains. We implemented a within-subject design in which participants completed a food choice, an intertemporal discounting, and a social preferences task in hungry and sated states while their eye-movements were recorded. Hungry participants were more likely to look at and subsequently select tasty over healthy food items, while attention and choice remained unaffected in the non-food tasks. Cognitive modelling indicated that hunger state selectively affected attention-driven evidence accumulation processes in the food choice task. Altogether, our results are consistent with a domain-specific view, indicating that attentional and decision-making processes in non-food domains remain unaffected by states of elevated hunger.