A response to Zhang et al. (2018), “Can Mouse-tracking Reveal Attribute Processing Speeds in Dietary Self-control? Commentary on Sullivan et al. (2015) and Lim et al. (2018)”

Abstract

In Sullivan et al. (2015), mouse-tracking was used in a food choice paradigm to test two related hypotheses: 1) that there are differences in the relative speed with which the decision-making circuitry computes and weights the value of attributes like health and taste; and, 2) that individual differences in these relative speeds are associated with individual differences in the ability to make healthy dietary choices. Regression analysis of the mouse-tracking paths found that health became significantly predictive of the mouse s angle of movement ~195 ms later than taste, on average. Moreover, individual dietary self-control varied with estimates of the individual differences in the relative speed with which taste (tTaste) and health (tHealth) entered the decision-making process. Similar results have been found in other studies, including Lim et al. (2018) and the new data presented in Zhang et al. (2018). However, Zhang et al. (2018) argue that the conclusions of the previous work are flawed due to problems with the methods used in the previous literature. Here, we respond to each of their points. Among other results, we find that the central analysis technique used by Zhang et al. (2018) eliminates the difference in tTaste and tHealth even when it is built into a simulated dataset.