Our brains evaluate food within milliseconds, long before we’ve decided to eat it

By Violet Chae, PhD Candidate, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne
Daniel Feuerriegel, ARC DECRA Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Tijl Grootswagers, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University

Imagine you’re at the grocery store, standing before a selection of snacks. Seemingly without thinking, you skip over the rice crackers to pick out a bag of chips.

These types of choices are called dietary decisions. It’s how we consider many different aspects of a food – including tastiness, healthiness and price – in order to decide what to buy and what to eat.

It’s not well understood how our brains use all these different bits of information when making food choices. When does information about each aspect of the food become available to our brains to consider? That’s…

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