Abstract
Food images are useful stimuli for the study of cognitive processes as well as eating behavior. To enhance rigor and reproducibility in task-based research, it is advantageous to have stimulus sets that are publicly available and well characterized. Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders is a publicly available set of 138 images of Western food items. The set was developed for the study of eating disorders, particularly for use in tasks that capture eating behavior characteristic of these illnesses. It contains foods that are typically eaten, as well as those typically avoided, by individuals with eating disorders. Each image has now been rated across 17 different attributes by a large general United States population sample via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 1054). Ratings included subjective attributes (e.g., tastiness, healthiness, and favorable texture) as well as estimates of nutrient content (e.g., fat and carbohydrate). Each participant rated a subset of stimulus set food items (46 foods) on all 17 dimensions. Additional description of the image set is provided in terms of physical image information and accurate nutritional information. Correlations between subjective ratings were calculated and an exploratory factor analysis and exploratory cluster analysis completed. Outcomes of the factor analysis suggested foods may be described along three latent factors of healthiness, tastiness, and umami taste; the cluster analysis highlighted five distinct clusters of foods varying on these same dimensions. Descriptive outcomes indicated that the stimulus set includes a range of foods that vary along multiple dimensions and thus is likely to be useful in addressing various research questions surrounding eating behavior and cognition in healthy populations, as well as in those with eating disorders. The provision of comprehensive descriptive information allows for stimulus selection that is optimized for a given research question and promotes strong inference.
Highlights
Food is generally considered a primary reward, and as a consequence is commonly used as a stimulus when examining processes fundamental to human behavior, including motivation, learning, and value-based decision-making (Rangel, 2013)
We introduce a new and freely available set of food stimuli, Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders, and provide a deep characterization of this set, using attribute ratings collected from a large population cohort
Foods varying in one dimension may vary in multiple other ways that influence participant behavior (Scheibehenne et al, 2007; Satterthwaite and Fellows, 2018). We explored this possibility within our stimulus set, by assessing correlations between different subjective rating attributes, informing the design and interpretation of future research using the image set
Summary
Food is generally considered a primary reward, and as a consequence is commonly used as a stimulus when examining processes fundamental to human behavior, including motivation, learning, and value-based decision-making (Rangel, 2013). Tasks involving food images have been employed to capture eating preferences and behavior. This has been in attempts to explain the excess consumption of highly palatable, high-fat, foods in the context of obesity (e.g., Hendrikse et al, 2015) and to better understand processes underlying persistent maladaptive eating behavior in eating disorders (e.g., Berner et al, 2017; Lloyd and Steinglass, 2018; Stojek et al, 2018). We introduce a new and freely available set of food stimuli, Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders, and provide a deep characterization of this set, using attribute ratings collected from a large population cohort. We consider how descriptive attributes are related and how foods group together based on the attribute ratings
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