Do colours of food have effect on people’s appetite?
David Hubel David Hubel is an American neuroscientist known for his studies of the neural basis of vision. His research on development of the visual system and their work established a foundation for visual neurophysiology, explaining a foundation for visual neurophysiology. Background Although food is typically associated with our sense of taste, there are other senses that can affect our feelings towards food (including smell, and in my design case, colour). If you have noticed, most fancy and high end restaurants take time to prepare food to look and be presented a certain way. This would not change the taste of the food, but it is quite clear that people are more excited to eat food that is visually appealing. This could be a study that would be of great use to either restaurants or mothers with little picky eaters. In addition, such a study might give people who want to healthily lose weight a new sight. Hypothesis Speaking of myself, food with bright colors (like pink) usually seems more attractive to me than food with dim colors (like black). I have often wondered does this happen to everybody or just me? I also have learned from my drawing class that brains are more easily to get excited when we see something with brighter color. Therefore, my hypothesis for this study would be people have greater appetite for food with bright color than food with dim color. Variables There are two variables in this study: one is the brightness of color of the food (independent variable), the other one is people’s appetite (dependent variable). According to the attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light, white would be the brightest color among all the colors, while black is the dimmest. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target. For example, pink would be a brighter color than dark red. In this particular study, People’s appetite would perform as their choice of food when they are giving the option of multiple colors of the same food item and see what they choose. Methods The study will be conducted using a survey in 10 restaurants (places that we might regard as naturalistic settings) with a large sample population (perhaps of about 1000 people, 100 people in each restaurant). Use food coloring to alter the color of a type of colorless candy but not the taste of the candy. Food coloring used here should be harmless to participants’ health. Use 2 exact same colorless glasses (glass 1 and glass 2) to store 10 candies with different colors in each. Each candy in glass 1 should have a pair (same color but different brightness) in glass 2. In another words, if there is a red candy in glass 1, then there will be a red candy with less brightness in glass 2. Serve people with these 2 glasses after they finish their meals, walking out from the restaurant to let them pick only one candy from either glass 1 or glass 2. Questions in the survey will ask the participants the reason of their choice and their experience in