Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the current study, we used a free association task to understand how food concepts are organized in one’s mental representation. We also tried to predict different weight groups based on these representational structures. One hundred and twelve participants participated via an online website. 135 Korean food word cues and 10 food-related contexts were presented, and participants were asked to type as many words that come to mind. The result shows an overall difference between the obesity and the normal-weight group in reaction time and response number per cue. This word relationship shows how associations between food concepts can predict people’s health issues such as body weight.