NCT03337633

Effects of Restaurant Menu Design on Food Ordering Outcomes

Effects of Menu Design on Psychophysiological Measures of Cognitive Load and Food Ordering Outcomes

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 61 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Alabama at Birmingham · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 19 Years – 35 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

High cognitive load activities can influence energy intake from food. It is unknown how restaurant menu designs may affect patrons in terms of cognitive demand and subsequent ordering of food.Objective: Our objective was to develop and experimentally test menu designs that differ in cognitive load to test the subjective and objective stress measures on food ordering.

Detailed description

For the first experiment, a parallel randomized trial of healthy young adults (n= 30) was conducted to compare ordering from one of two menu designs (easy - E, hard - H) developed in a prior pilot study. In the second experiment, restrained eaters were specifically recruited and asked to fast before the experiment to determine the influence of cognitive load of menus on energy ordered (n=31). Galvanic skin response was used as an objective proxy for relative cognitive load, and questionnaires were used to assess perceptions of the menus. The main outcomes were the number of items ordered and total energy of the items ordered (in kilocalories).

Conditions

• Food Preferences

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Menu design	Participants were given 5 minutes to order a hypothetical meal from the assigned test menu by circling all items they wanted to order.

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-04-01
• Primary completion: 2015-03-20
• Completion: 2015-03-20
• First posted: 2017-11-09
• Last updated: 2017-11-09