That was the premise that BU biopsychologist Alice Cronin-Golomb and her research partners adopted when they designed the “red plate study.” Their idea was to see whether senior citizens with advanced Alzheimer’s disease would eat more food from red plates than they did from white ones.
The researchers in the Vision & Cognition Lab of the Center for Clinical Biopsychology, which Cronin-Golomb directs, had reason to hope that their experiment would succeed. Nursing home staff often complain that Alzheimer’s patients do not finish the food on their plates even when staff encourages them to do so. Forty percent of individuals with severe Alzheimer’s lose an unhealthy amount of weight. Previous explanations for this phenomenon included depression, inability to concentrate on more than one food at a time, and inability to eat unassisted. Cronin-Golomb and her colleagues took a different approach. They believed this behavior might be explained by the visual-cognitive deficiencies caused by Alzheimer’s. Patients with the disease cannot process visual data—like contrast and depth perception—as well as most other seniors.
So Cronin-Golomb’s team, led by then-BU postdoctoral fellow and current Senior Lecturer in Psychology Tracy Dunne (GRS’92, ’99), tested advanced Alzheimer’s patients’ level of food intake with standard white plates and with bright-red ones. What they found was astonishing—patients eating from red plates consumed 25 percent more food than those eating from white plates.
Since these findings were published in 2004, some nursing homes have made red plates the norm.
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Red Alzheimer's Signage
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