Nutrition labels are the most commonly used tools to promote healthy choices. Research has shown that color-coded traffic light (TL) labels are more effective than purely numerical Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) labels at promoting healthy eating. While these effects of TL labels on food choice are hypothesized to rely on attention, how this occurs remains unknown. Based on previous eye-tracking research we hypothesized that TL labels compared to GDA labels will attract more attention, will induce shifts in attention allocation to healthy food items, and will increase the influence of attention to the labels on food choice. To test our hypotheses, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment where participants chose between healthy and unhealthy food items accompanied either by TL or GDA labels. We found that TL labels biased choices towards healthier items because their presence caused participants to allocate more attention to healthy items and less to unhealthy items. Moreover, our data indicated that TL labels were more likely to be looked at, and had a larger effect on choice, despite attracting less dwell time. These results reveal that TL labels increase healthy food choice, relative to GDA labels, by shifting attention and the effects of attention on choice.

中文翻译：

---

突出的营养标签将人们的注意力转移到健康食品上，对他们的选择产生更大的影响

营养标签是促进健康选择的最常用工具。研究表明，颜色编码的交通灯 (TL) 标签在促进健康饮食方面比纯数字指导每日摄入量 (GDA) 标签更有效。虽然假设 TL 标签对食物选择的这些影响依赖于注意力，但这种情况如何发生仍然未知。基于之前的眼动追踪研究，我们假设与 GDA 标签相比，TL 标签会吸引更多的注意力，会引起对健康食品的注意力分配的转变，并会增加对标签的注意力对食物选择的影响。为了测试我们的假设，我们进行了一项眼动追踪实验，参与者在带有 TL 或 GDA 标签的健康和不健康食品之间进行选择。我们发现 TL 标记偏向于选择更健康的物品，因为它们的存在导致参与者将更多的注意力分配给健康的物品，而不是不健康的物品。此外，我们的数据表明，尽管停留时间较短，但 TL 标签更有可能被查看，并且对选择的影响更大。这些结果表明，相对于 GDA 标签，TL 标签通过转移注意力和注意力对选择的影响来增加健康食品的选择。