Evaluating Human Processing of Front of Pack Nutritional Labels

描述(由申请人提供)：肥胖与死亡率、发病率和医疗费用的增加有关。通过改变人们的食物选择来遏制肥胖症的流行将会带来巨大的健康和经济利益。长期以来，人们一直认为，促进健康饮食的一种方式是以产品包装上展示的营养事实面板(NFP)的形式向消费者提供营养信息。对这种方法有效性的研究表明，当人们处理信息时，传统的NFP标签在促进健康食品选择方面是有效的，但很少有人关注、编码和理解传统NFP标签中提供的信息。为了增加营养标签的积极影响，人们一直在推动采用面板正面(FOP)营养标签。这些FOP标签在包装正面或原理显示面板上显示有关几种关键营养物质的信息，并包括旨在快速吸引消费者注意力的小文本、图标和/或颜色系统的组合。尽管这种方法直观上很有吸引力，但几乎没有客观的实验支持来验证FOP标签导致了对营养信息的更多关注和处理。此外，这些FOP中的信息呈现形式并不是基于关于注意和认知加工的基础研究。我们的建议将视觉认知的基础研究应用于设计一种新的FOP格式，该格式经过优化以捕获注意力，并且将需要较少的认知资源来编码、理解和使用。在注意力和视觉认知的基础研究中传统使用的经验方法(例如，眼球跟踪、变化检测和附带记忆任务)被用来评估不同的FOP设计在多大程度上吸引人们对营养信息的注意，诱导信息编码到记忆中，并促进快速、跨产品的营养比较。以这种方式优化传递格式应该产生一种标签，成功地将营养信息传达给更多的人口，从而使更多的人能够做出健康的饮食决定，最终降低肥胖率。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Obesity is associated with increased mortality, morbidity, and increased health care costs. Curbing the obesity epidemic by altering people's food choices would have substantial health and economic benefit. It has long been believed that one way to promote healthy eating is to provide consumers with nutritional information in the form of a nutrition facts panel (NFP) displayed on product packaging. Research on the effectiveness of this approach suggests that the traditional NFP labels are effective in promoting healthy food choices when people process the information, but that too few people attend to, encode and understand the information presented in traditional NFP labels. In an attempt to increase the positive impact of nutritional labeling, there has been a push to adopt front of panel (FOP) nutritional labels. These FOP labels present information about a few key nutrients on the front of the package, or Principle Display Panel, and include a combination of small text, icon, and/or color systems that are designed to quickly capture the attention of the consumer. Although this approach is intuitively appealing, there is little objective, experimental support validating that FOP labels result in more attention to and processing of nutritional information. Additionally, the format for presenting information in these FOPs has not been based on basic research about attention and cognitive processing. Our proposal applies basic research on visual cognition to the design of a novel FOP format that is optimized to capture attention and will require few cognitive resources to encode, comprehend, and use. Empirical methods traditionally used in basic research on attention and visual cognition (e.g., eye-tracking, change detection, and incidental memory tasks) are used to evaluate how well different FOP designs attract attention to nutritional information, induce encoding of information into memory, and facilitate rapid, cross-product nutritional comparisons. Optimizing the delivery format in this way should produce a label that successfully communicates nutritional information to a greater segment of the population, thereby empowering more people to make healthful dietary decisions, ultimately reducing obesity rates.