The in preferences for appetitive foods following a novel

The maintenance of behavioral change over the long
term is essential to achieve public health goals such as combatting obesity and
drug use. Previous work by our group has demonstrated a reliable shift in
preferences for appetitive foods following a novel non-reinforced training
paradigm. In the current studies, we tested whether distributing training
trials over two consecutive days would affect preferences immediately after
training as well as over time at a one-month follow-up. In three studies, we
found that spacing of cue-approach training induced a shift in food choice
preferences over one month. The spacing and massing schedule employed governed
the long-term changes in choice behavior. Applying spacing strategies to
training paradigms that target automatic processes could prove a useful tool
for the long-term maintenance of health improvement goals with the development
of real-world behavioral change paradigms that incorporate distributed practice
principles.