Where the Eye Leads, Choice Follows: An Eye-Tracking Study on Salience-based Sustainability Cues in Food Choices

The hypotheses, study design and analysis plan of this project were preregistered on OSF on Janurary 16, 2026. We duplicated the preregistration files here and made the anonymized dataset and code available. Project description: Sustainable food consumption is essential for mitigating environmental harm, yet many consumers struggle to translate their sustainability intentions into action. Even with sustainability intentions, consumers frequently encounter practical implementation barriers at the point of choice, including information overload, limited clarity about which products are sustainable, competing visual marketing cues, and the cognitive effort required to identify sustainable options. Together, these barriers contribute to the intention-behavior gap in sustainable food consumption. Moving beyond a “one-size-fits-all” approach, this study targets individuals who already hold intentions to consume sustainable food but have not yet fully translated them into practice. Visual salience cues, which increase or decrease the visual prominence of choice options, represent a promising intervention to address these barriers directly at the point of decision. By modifying how sustainable and unsustainable products appear in consumers’ vision, such cues can guide attention and simplify the choice process without requiring explicit persuasion or additional information processing. The present study tests whether visual sustainability cues can help consumers translate their sustainability intentions into action, and through which pathways these effects occur. We compare two types of visual cues: (1) diminishment cues that visually de-emphasize unsustainable products by reducing their salience, and (2) enhancement cues that visually highlight sustainable products, and an additional control group where no cues are present. We hypothesize that visual salience cues facilitate sustainable choices through three potential pathways: (a) a perceptual pathway, by directing visual attention toward sustainable options or away from unsustainable ones; (b) a cognitive pathway, by increasing the ease with which consumers can recognize and differentiate sustainable products (sustainable-choice fluency); and (c) an affective pathway, by reducing pre-decisional conflict and ambivalence when competing motives (e.g., taste, price) are present. By identifying these mechanisms, the study aims to advance theoretical understanding of how visual cues enable intention execution and to provide practical insights for designing choice environments that support sustainable consumer behavior.