Global judgments of caloric information in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT Viewing sets of food products is common in consumer environments. Previous research on visual perception suggests the phenomena of global judgements (or summary statistical representation), which means that people often extract summary statistical information of multiple objects (e.g., average size, hue) at a glance. Consumers may form summary statistical representations of food products. Despite the growing number of studies on the cognitive processing of food products, global judgements of caloric information and how differences in age influence the global judgements remain unexplored. Here, we aimed to reveal global judgements of caloric perception in younger and older adults. Across two studies, participants (adults in Study 1 and younger and older adults in Study 2) viewed food image sets (single, two, four, or six images) and estimated the average caloric counts. The results revealed that the participants could accurately estimate the average caloric counts to some extent at two set sizes. Moreover, the participants were less able to extract global judgements of caloric information at four and six set sizes. Overall, our findings reveal limited cognitive processing for assessing average caloric content, and age differences modulate the estimation accuracy.