Are food cinemagraphs more yummy than stills?

Cinemagraphs are a new medium that is intermediate between photographs and videos: most of the frame is static, while some details are animated in a seamless loop. Given their vivid appearance we expected that food cinemagraphs evoke stronger affective and appetitive responses than their static counterparts (stills). In this study we measured the Liking (affective) and Wanting (appetitive) responses to both cinemagraphs and stills representing a wide range of different food products. Our results show that food cinemagraphs only slightly increase Wanting scores and do not affect Liking scores, compared to similar stills. Although we found no main effect of image dynamics on Liking, we did observe a significant effect for some individual food items. However, the effects of image dynamics on Liking and Wanting appeared to be product specific: for some products dynamic images were scored higher on Liking or Wanting, while static images were scored higher for other products. This suggests that image dynamics intensifies subjective Liking and Wanting judgements but does not alter their polarity. Further research is needed to resolve this issue.