UA receives $650,000 to study food choice

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by Talk Business & Politics staff ([email protected]) ago 22 views 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a $650,000 grant to a research team led by the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas in collaboration with the Division of Agriculture and the College of Engineering.

UA researchers will investigate the potential to reshape nutrition policies by studying emotional factors and how they affect food choices. The three-year grant will support research combining behavioral economics, nutrition science and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain deeper insights into consumer decision-making regarding food.

The research team is led by Andy Brownback and Sherry Li of the Walton College’s Department of Economics. Collaborating on experimental design is Brandon McFadden, a researcher for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and professor in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences. Guiding the study’s AI elements is Khoa Luu of the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering.

“This grant will allow us to examine the emotional antecedents of food choices in ways that have never been done before,” Brownback said. “By leveraging AI and machine vision technology to analyze microexpressions, we hope to quantify how emotional states causally affect the food choices people make here.”

Luu developed machine vision AI technology for the study. The data it collects will be correlated with food choices to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the decision-making process.

The grant is part of the USDA’s broader efforts to improve nutrition and food security among Americans. The research findings could help inform USDA programs and policies to encourage healthier food choices and address food insecurity.

“Our goal is to understand why people often make choices that don’t align with their stated goals,” Brownback said. “This ‘dynamic inconsistency’ is a central issue in behavioral economics, and understanding it better could revolutionize how we approach nutrition policy.”