... Still, given the reported moderate-to-large effects of chronic invasive VNS on body weight in animals and humans, more mechanistic research is necessary to unravel subacute or subconscious effects of taVNS that could be used to improve future treatments of pathological alterations in eating behavior and food choice. Implicit liking and wanting as assessed using reaction times (Cowdrey, Finlayson, & Park, 2013;Dalton & Finlayson, 2014;Finlayson, Arlotti, Dalton, King, & Blundell, 2011), approach-avoidance tasks (Piqueras-Fiszman, Kraus, & Spence, 2014) implicit association tests (Connell, Finkelstein, Scott, & Vallen, 2018;Kraus & Piqueras-Fiszman, 2018), effort allocation tasks , or combined physiological and behavioral measures (Müller, Teckentrup, Rebollo, Hallschmid, & Kroemer, 2021) may reflect such subconscious preferences that conscious choices are operating on (Finlayson, Bryant, Blundell, & King, 2009;Finlayson et al., 2007;Rogers & Hardman, 2015) and, thus, could be acutely modulated by taVNS more rapidly compared to consciously reported liking and wanting. In general, our results support the idea that vagal afferent activation elicits unconscious effects on food choice, which is in line with the theorized role of the "low road" to food choice (de Araujo et al., 2019). ...