Hungry
people are fixated on food
Tuesday March 06, 2012 08:20:26 AM,
IANS
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Paris: Hungry people
seem to be fixated on food, seeing food-related words more clearly
than people who have just eaten, says a new research.
Psychologists have known for long that what is going on inside our
head affects our senses.
For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are,
and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter.
Remi Radel of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France,
wanted to investigate how this happens -- whether it was right
away, as the brain receives signals from the eyes, or a little
later, as the brain's higher-level thinking processes get
involved, the journal Psychological Science reported.
Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index. On the
day of his or her test, each student was told to arrive at the lab
at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were
told there was a delay, according to a university statement.
Some were told to come back in 10 minutes while others were given
an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when
they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten.
For the experiment, the participants looked at a computer screen.
One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen for about 1/300th of a
second each, at a size that was just at the threshold of what that
person could consciously perceive.
Hungry people saw food-related words as brighter and were better
at identifying such words.
As the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen,
this means that the difference is in perception, Radel said. It
was not because of some kind of processing happening in the brain
after you have already figured out what you are looking at.
"This is something great to me, that humans can really perceive
what they need or what they strive for, to know that our brain can
really be at the disposal of our motives and needs," Radel said.
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