Abstract
Food neophobia is the fear of new foods, and it is associated with negative health outcomes. Recent work suggests that it is negatively correlated with the ability to discriminate visually similar dishes, but only in color. This led to a novel prediction: that colorblindness would be negatively associated with food neophobia. Here, we replicated that colorblind men (n = 103) are less food neophobic than non-colorblind men (n = 273), even when participants are unaware that being colorblind or not was relevant to their selection. We extend these results to food disgust, and find that both food neophobia and food disgust increase with age in colorblind men, whereas they are stable in noncolorblind men. These results underscore the role of color perception on affective attitudes towards food, in the absence of demand characteristics or manipulation of color in images. Our results advance our understanding of non-perceptual and affective consequences of colorblindness. They also have possible implications for improving treatment approaches in cases of severe food neophobia.