The Effects of Caloric Education, Trial-by-Trial Feedback, and their Interaction on College-Aged Women's Abilities to Estimate Caloric Content.

Abstract

Many people track the caloric content of food, given its relevance to weight loss, gain, or maintenance. A better understanding of the psychological underpinnings of caloric-content estimation for unhealthy foods is of significant psychological and public-health interest. This study investigated whether college-aged women could be trained to estimate the caloric content of unhealthy foods more accurately via exposure to caloric-content education, trial-by-trial feedback, and their combination. The caloric content of 84 foods was estimated and three transfer tasks were completed by 238 undergraduate women. Mixed-effects modeling estimated three aspects of the quadratic function linking true and judged caloric content: threshold (average perceived caloric content), linear sensitivity, and change in sensitivity as caloric content increases. On average, college-aged women underestimated caloric content, demonstrated substantial linear sensitivity to caloric content, and did not show reduced sensitivity as caloric content increased. Trial-by-trial feedback, but not Caloric Education, enhanced caloric estimation on the first two tasks. College-aged women show biased but sensitive judgments of the caloric content of unhealthy food presented in images. Initial evidence suggests that trial-by-trial feedback may be an efficacious strategy to enhance caloric-content estimation, at least when viewing static images of foods.