۱- Introduction

۲- Experiment 1

۳- Experiment 2

۴- General discussion

References

Abstract

We conducted two event-related potentials (ERP) experiments to investigate consumers’ responses to different types of food bundles. In Experiment 1, the participants were instructed to indicate their wanting of a three-yogurt bundle when their neural activity was recorded. The results of self-report wanting scores revealed that the participants wanted bundles consisting of their favorite yogurt products more than those of disliked products. Such a difference in self-report scores was also indexed by the N2 in frontal brain and the P1 in the left hemisphere. By contrast, bundles consisting of three different yogurt products elicited a smaller amplitude of the N2 than bundles consisting of two favorite products and one disliked product, but these two types of bundles received comparable wanting scores. Moreover, we asked the participants in Experiment 2 to perform a visual discrimination task on these bundles, and did not found these effects on the N2 or the P1. Collectively, these results revealed neural activities underlying consumers’ responses to food rewards, and demonstrated the role of individuals’ variety-seeking tendency in wanting process.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

In summary, two major findings emerged from the present study. First, our results associated the N2 with wanting for food bundles, though this wanting effect was intertwined with liking (also see Goto et al., 2017; Telpaz et al., 2015). This result not only extended the scope from wanting for a single product to wanting for a bundle of multiple products, but also specifically linked people’s wanting for food bundles to smaller amplitude of the N2 in frontal region of the brain. Our results also associated wanting for food bundles with the posterior P1. To the best of our knowledge, the present study provides the first empirical evidence to link ERPs earlier than the N2 to wanting. This result associated the P1 to food-related cognitive processes (Becker et al., 2016), and is in line with the literature about that the P1 is sensitive to the influence of motivation (Cunningham et al., 2012; Hammerschmidt et al., 2017). Second, the results of this study revealed that the N2 may also index the differences in consumers’ responses to food rewards that cannot be easily captured by self-report ratings. That is, our results of self-report ratings did not reveal any significant difference between the 3M and 2F1D bundles, but our ERP results did reveal significant differences in the N2 elicited by these two types of food rewards. The dissociations between self-report ratings and ERPs we observed in this study are in line with the literature that people can generate motivation without conscious awareness (Winkielman, Berridge, & Wilbarger, 2005), and demonstrate that EEG signals are sensitive enough to capture the implicit processes of motivation processes (Jones, Childers, & Jiang, 2012; Pozharliev, Verbeke, van Strien, & Bagozzi, 2015).