An Accessible Tool to Measure Implicit Approach-Avoidance Tendencies Towards Food Outside the Lab

Implicit approach-avoidance tendencies can be measured by the approach-avoidance task (AAT). The emergence of mobile variants of the AAT enable its use for both in-the-lab and in-the-field experiments. Within the food domain, use of the AAT is concentrated in research on eating disorders or healthy eating and is seldom used as an implicit measure of food experience. Given the prevalence of explicit measures in this field, the AAT may provide additional valuable insights into food experience. To facilitate the use of the AAT as an implicit measure, a processing tool and accompanying graphical user interface (GUI) have been developed for a mobile smartphone variant of the AAT. This tool improves upon the existing processing framework of this mobile AAT by applying more robust filtering and introduces additional sensor correction algorithms to improve the quality of sensor data. Along with refined estimates of reaction time (RT) and reaction force (RF), these processing improvements introduce a new metric: the response distance (RD). The capabilities of the tool, along with the potential added value of calculating RF and RD, are explained in this paper through the processing of pilot data on molded and unmolded food. In particular, the RF and RD may be indicative of participants' arousal. The tool developed in this paper is open source and compatible with other experiments making use of the mobile AAT within, and beyond, the domain of food experience.