Spacing of cue-approach training leads to better maintenance of behavioral change.

Akram Bakkour,Russell A Poldrack,Tom Schonberg,Rotem Botvinik-Nezer,Ashleigh M Hover,Neta Cohen,Jacobus P Van Wouwe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0201580

Akram Bakkour, Russell A Poldrack + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201580

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jul 30, 2018
Citations: 12	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: The University of Texas at Austin, Tel Aviv University

Abstract

The maintenance of behavioral change over the long term is essential to achieve public health goals such as combatting obesity and drug use. Previous work by our group has demonstrated a reliable shift in preferences for appetitive foods following a novel non-reinforced training paradigm. In the current studies, we tested whether distributing training trials over two consecutive days would affect preferences immediately after training as well as over time at a one-month follow-up. In four studies, three different designs and an additional pre-registered replication of one sample, we found that spacing of cue-approach training induced a shift in food choice preferences over one month. The spacing and massing schedule employed governed the long-term changes in choice behavior. Applying spacing strategies to training paradigms that target automatic processes could prove a useful tool for the long-term maintenance of health improvement goals with the development of real-world behavioral change paradigms that incorporate distributed practice principles.

Highlights

The potential for targeting automatic processes to change human behavior has become increasingly clear [1], especially in light of the relative ineffectiveness of relying on effortful control of behavior, given the largely automatic and habitual nature of everyday human behavior [2]
We found that spacing cue-approach training” (CAT) trials did not have a lasting effect on choices of Go over NoGo, but did seem to induce a preference for Spaced over Massed items
The potential negative effect of longer lags on maintenance of choice preference shift in studies 1 & 2 may have in part driven the choice of Spaced over Massed items, given that Massed items have longer lags on the days when they were trained along with Spaced items

Summary

Introduction

The potential for targeting automatic processes to change human behavior has become increasingly clear [1], especially in light of the relative ineffectiveness of relying on effortful control of behavior, given the largely automatic and habitual nature of everyday human behavior [2]. Previous research aimed at changing choice preferences for appetitive foods employed a novel non-reinforced training paradigm named “cue-approach training” (CAT) [3]. Cueapproach training was found to be effective at influencing choice behavior in an immediate test [3,4,5,6,7] and the choice preference shift was shown to persist over at least two months after the longest cue-approach training employed [3,8]. The cue-approach task is related to previous work showing that visual attention both reflects and influences choices [9,10,11] and to other research on the attentional boost effect that highlights the importance of driving attention at behaviorally relevant points in time in boosting memory for incidental stimuli [12,13,14]. During CAT, participants learn to associate a tone cue to press a button when particular food items

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