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Learning About Nutrition From 'food Porn' and Online Quizzes


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Sharing photos of food.

Harvard and Columbia university researchers designed an online experiment to test how people learn about nutrition in the context of a social, online quiz.

Credit: Harvard University

Researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities conducted a study to determine whether popular online quizzes and food imagery could be leveraged for nutrition education.

Using Harvard professor Krzysztof Gajos' LabIntheWild behavioral research platform, the researchers sought to evaluate volunteers' learning about nutrition in the context of an online social quiz. Participants compared photos of meals and gauged their nutritional value as part of the six-month test.

Although participants who received feedback explaining the correctness of their answer performed better on the quiz and gained more knowledge than those who received no feedback or explanations, the difference between explanations generated by experts and explanations from peers was insignificant.

"We can corral the wisdom of the crowd to help people make more informed decisions to improve their health," says Columbia professor Lena Mamykina.

The work was presented last month at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver, CO.

From Harvard University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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