Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

‘Activity-equivalent’ food labels are believed to encourageconsumers to partake in exercise. This may occur by semanticpriming, where featuring images of physical activity increasesthe mental accessibility of the concept of exercise, making itmore ‘fluent’ and therefore more influential on people’sbehaviour. We tested how the format of labels (image vs.text) and representation of energy (‘activity’ vs. ‘calorie)affected mental accessibility of exercise in a word-fragmentcompletion task and participants’ behavioural intentions forexercise (N = 142). Participants exposed to calorie labelsproduced more exercise-related words and viewed animagined exercise scenario as shorter and more enjoyable.Images led to higher intentions to exercise than text whenthey described activities but they led to lower intentions toexercise than text when they described calories. Findingssuggest that activity labels do not trigger more activity relatedthoughts, but could increase exercise intentions only ifpresented in pictorial format.