The consumption of a food typically leads to a decrease in its subsequent intake through habituation—a decrease in one’s responsiveness to the food and motivation to obtain it. We demonstrated that habituation to a food item can occur even when its consumption is merely imagined. Five experiments showed that people who repeatedly imagined eating a food (such as cheese) many times subsequently consumed less of the imagined food than did people who repeatedly imagined eating that food fewer times, imagined eating a different food (such as candy), or did not imagine eating a food. They did so because they desired to eat it less, not because they considered it less palatable. These results suggest that mental representation alone can engender habituation to a stimulus.
Last. Mark E. Bouton(UVM: University of Vermont)H-Index: 73
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Research has shown that animals and humans habituate on a variety of behavioral and physiological responses to repeated presentations of food cues, and habituation is related to amount of food consumed and cessation of eating. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of experimental paradigms used to study habituation, integrate a theoretical approach to habituation to food based on memory and associative conditioning models, and review research on factors that influence habituation...
Last. Anita Jansen(UM: Maastricht University)H-Index: 80
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Sensory-specific satiety refers to a temporary decline in pleasure derived from consuming a certain food in comparison to other unconsumed foods. It has been argued that such a reduction may not be limited to food liking but extends to food wanting as well. Animal research suggests that sensory-specific satiety reflects a reduction in both food liking and food wanting and in the present study it was investigated whether this also holds true for humans. Participants had to consume a certain amoun...
Last. Piotr Winkielman(UCSD: University of California, San Diego)H-Index: 44
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Five experiments explored the effects of immediate repetition priming on episodic recognition (the "Jacoby-Whitehouse effect") as measured with forced-choice testing. These experiments confirmed key predictions of a model adapted from D. E. Huber and R. C. O'Reilly's (2003) dynamic neural network of perception. In this model, short prime durations pre-activate primed items, enhancing perceptual fluency and familiarity, whereas long prime durations result in habituation, causing perceptual disflu...
What is the relationship between memory and appetite? We explored this question by examining preferences for recently consumed food in patients with amnesia. Although the patients were unable to remember having eaten, and were inclined to eat multiple meals, we found that sensory-specific satiety was intact in these patients. The data suggest that sensory-specific satiety can occur in the absence of explicit memory for having eaten and that impaired sensory-specific satiety does not underlie the...
Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people's thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects of distance into domains where construal-level theory is silent. Across four experiments, participants w...
: Based on converging evidence that visual and olfactory images are key components of food cravings, the authors tested a central prediction of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, that mutual competition between modality-specific tasks and desire-related imagery can suppress such cravings. In each of Experiments 1 and 2, 90 undergraduate women underwent an imaginal food craving induction protocol and then completed either a visual, auditory, or olfactory imagery task. As predicted, the vi...
In 2 experiments, the efficacy of motor imagery for learning to type number sequences was examined. Adults practiced typing 4-digit numbers. Then, during subsequent training, they either typed in the same or a different location, imagined typing, merely looked at each number, or performed an irrelevant task. Repetition priming (faster responses for old relative to new numbers) was observed on an immediate test and after a 3-month delay for participants who imagined typing. Improvement across the...
Based on Wegner’s Ironic Processing Theory, this study examines the effects of suppressing eating-related thoughts in a sample of 77 female students. A distinction was made between disinhibited restrainers (high dietary restraint/high disinhibition), inhibited restrainers (high dietary restraint/low disinhibition) and low restrainers. Results indicate that disinhibited restrainers used thought suppression more often and were the only group to show a rebound effect for eating-related thoughts aft...
Abstract A large number of cognitive neuroscience studies point to the similarities in the neural circuits activated during the generation, imagination, as well as observation of one's own and other's behavior. Such findings support the shared representations account of social cognition, which is suggested to provide the basic mechanism for social interaction. Mental simulation may also be a representational tool to understand the self and others. However, successfully navigating these shared re...
The authors argue that human desire involves conscious cognition that has strong affective connotation and is potentially involved in the determination of appetitive behavior rather than being epiphenomenal to it. Intrusive thoughts about appetitive targets are triggered automatically by external or physiological cues and by cognitive associates. When intrusions elicit significant pleasure or relief, cognitive elaboration usually ensues. Elaboration competes with concurrent cognitive tasks throu...
The brain–computer interface (BCI) is a promising technology where a user controls a robot or computer by thinking with no movement. There are several underlying principles to implement BCI, such as sensorimotor rhythms, P300, steady-state visually evoked potentials, and directional tuning. Generally, different principles are applied to BCI depending on the application, because strengths and weaknesses vary according to each BCI method. Therefore, BCI should be able to predict a user state to ap...
Last. Qian Janice Wang(CAS: Chinese Academy of Sciences)H-Index: 16
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Obesity continues to be a global issue. In recent years, researchers have started to question the role of our novel yet ubiquitous use of digital media in the development of obesity. With the recent COVID-19 outbreak affecting almost all aspects of society, many people have moved their social eating activities into the digital space, making the question as relevant as ever. The bombardment of appetizing food images and photography - colloquially referred to as "food porn" - has become a signific...
#1Benjamin M. Seitz(UCLA: University of California, Los Angeles)H-Index: 3
#2Aaron P. Blaisdell(UCLA: University of California, Los Angeles)H-Index: 24
Last. A. Janet Tomiyama(UCLA: University of California, Los Angeles)H-Index: 25
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Abstract How well do we remember eating food? Some nutritional scientists have decried memory of eating as being highly unreliable (i.e. low in accuracy), but it is unclear if memory of eating is particularly worse than memory of other behaviors. In fact, evolutionary reasoning suggests the mammalian memory system might be biased towards enhanced memory of eating. We created a novel behavioral task to investigate the relative strength and determinants of memory of eating. In this task, participa...
Many refinements of statistical design have been offered to solve the replication problem identified by the Open Science Collaboration and Camerer and colleagues. There are, however, two distinct k...
Social exclusion reduces happiness and well-being partly by creating a generalized expectation of future rejection and lack of belonging. An experiment (N = 709) using a guided imagination task fou...
Last. Nai-Hwa Lien(NTU: National Taiwan University)
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Abstract The fast fashion phenomenon has revolutionized the apparel industry over the past decade. However, research focused on the implications of brand country-of-origin (brand-COO) and sensory perception for consumer behavior remains scarce. This study draws on construal-level theory and active traits theory to develop and test a framework to identify the boundary conditions of the relationships among brand-COO, sensory perception, and consumer personality characteristics on purchase intentio...
Abstract Previous research has demonstrated that imagining consumption of a specific type of food helps individuals to consume less of that food. The present event-related potential study aimed at investigating the underlying neural correlates of this appetite-reducing strategy. A total of 86 women (mean age = 23.65 years) were randomly assigned to one of three imagination conditions. In each condition, they listened to a guided imagery script that either described the eating of 30 colorful butt...