Change detection for new food labels

The amount of information on food packages (e.g., environment- and health-related) has increased in Europe and other regions in recent years. It is therefore important to understand to what extent this information attracts the attention of and is processed by consumers, considering characteristics of the product information as well as person-specific variables such as age. In two studies we tested whether the change detection task is a useful paradigm for studying how individuals attend to and process recently introduced formats and contents of food labels. In the change detection tasks presented here, 133 participants were shown two photographs of a food package that differed in one label and were asked to identify as quickly as possible which information was constantly changing. We found systematic differences in change detection times for different types of product label content and format, representing the amount of attention habitually paid to the specific labels. Interestingly, the detection times for each label did not correlate with participants’ self-report measures of how much attention they give to this specific label during typical grocery shopping. In both studies we also found a positive correlation between age and time needed to detect change in label format and content, but only for labels that were introduced on packages in recent years (such as the ‘organic’ label) not on longer established information (such as the ‘best-before’ date).