Food Cognition
Appetitive Motivation, Food Cognition & Behavioural Interventions
My core experimental research investigates the cognitive and psychobiological mechanisms that govern appetitive motivation and food-related decision-making. By designing and evaluating targeted behavioural interventions—such as response inhibition and go/no-go training protocols—I explore how implicit cognitive processes can be modulated to support healthier dietary choices.
This work bridges basic cognitive neuroscience with applied behavioural science, utilizing robust experimental tasks, indirect valuation measures, and validated open-source stimulus databases to understand how we can effectively alter food preferences, cravings, and action tendencies.
Publications
• Witkam, R., Brealey, J., Tzavella, L., Finlay, A., Jones, A., & Robinson, E. (2026). Socioeconomic position and the effect of price interventions on healthier and less healthy food on food selection in a simulated food delivery app: a randomised controlled trial. Public Health Nutrition, 1-26. 📄 PDF
• Brealey, J., Evans, R., Finlay, A., Gough, T., Polden, M., Putra, I. G. N. E., Tzavella, L., Witkam, R. & Robinson, E. (2024). Does menu calorie labelling cause or exacerbate eating disorders?International Journal of Obesity, 48, 1679–1683. (2024) 📄 PDF
• Tzavella, L., Chambers, C. D. (2023). Explicit and implicit devaluation effects of food-specific response inhibition training. Journal of Cognition, 6(1): 10, pp. 1–20. 📄PDF 📊 Data & analysis scripts 📂Research materials 📝Preregistrations for Experiments 1 and 2
• Tzavella, L., Chambers, C. D. (2022). Response inhibition training and measures of explicit and implicit food valuation.Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 48:101230. ??PDF
• Randle, M., Duarte, I., Maizey, L., Tzavella, L., Adams, R. C., Chambers, C. D. (2022). The Restrain Food Database: validation of an open-source database of foods that should be eaten more or less as part of a healthy diet. Royal Society Open Science, 9(11): 220923. ??PDF 📊 📂Data, analysis scripts and research materials 📝Preregistration
• Tzavella, L., Lawrence, N. S., Button, K. S., et al. (2021). Effects of go/no-go training on food-related action tendencies, liking and choice. Royal Society Open Science, 8(11), 210666 . 📄PDF 📊 Data & analysis scripts 📝 Preregistration
• Tzavella, L., Maizey, L., Lawrence, A. D., Chambers, C. D. (2020). The affective priming paradigm as an indirect measure of food attitudes and related choice behaviour. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 1397–1415. 📄PDF 📊Data & analysis scripts 📂Research materials 📝 Stage 1 Registered Report protocol
Selected Presentations
• Talk | British Drinking and Feeding Group Annual Meeting: “The affective priming paradigm in the context of healthy and unhealthy foods” (Apr 12-13, 2018), Lyon, France.💻 Slides