Searching for triangles: An extension to food & packaging

- Visual search for triangular foods is studied in 2 experiments and 1 survey.
- Searching for triangular food or packaging was faster when it pointed downward.
- A triangular stimulus was less pleasant and less liked when it pointed downward.
- Cognitive processing of food/packaging is influenced by its appearance.

Two laboratory-based visual search experiments (Experiments 1 and 2) and an online survey (Experiment 3) were conducted in order to investigate the visual search for triangular foods. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that the visual search for a downward pointing triangular target was faster than when the same target pointed upward, regardless of whether the stimuli were simple geometric figures or photos of food. Experiment 2 replicated these results using images of both food and non-food packaging. Experiment 3 revealed that the same triangular stimuli were generally rated as less pleasant, less liked, and less familiar when they pointed downward than when they pointed upward. Taken together, these results therefore suggest that the cognitive processing of food images is influenced by incidental aspects of their visual appearance, and that such a pattern of results can also be extended to the case of food packaging.