What cognitive sciences have to say about the impacts of nutritional labelling formats

•Main nutritional labels were rationalized into discriminative criteria.•These criteria guided the review of the cognitive processes involved.•Traffic Light, Guideline Daily Amounts, and other labels were compared on this basis.•We conclude on the label that should be the easiest to process.

Social sciences have been exploring how different labelling systems affect people’s food choices, whereas cognitive psychology has largely ignored that question. We propose a normalization of the criteria that discriminate labels between them, which we use as a framework to review the cognitive processes involved when using these labelling systems. We insist on the heated debate between Traffic Light and Guideline Daily Amount labels, but did also address other labelling schemes like the Keyhole system. We conclude on which labels are cognitively the less effortful and the quickest to process.