Conditioned Cue Reactivity

What it is

Andrew Hill's review of the psychology of food craving lists conditioned cue reactivity among the processes that explain cravings, alongside cognitive and emotional ones. The idea rests on classical learning: a neutral cue that repeatedly comes before something rewarding starts to produce a response of its own.

Karolien van den Akker and colleagues applied the principles of Pavlovian conditioning to eating in a review in Current Addiction Reports. They described how food cues can readily become linked to eating responses through conditioning. Adrian Meule's review in Current Nutrition Reports discusses craving itself as possibly a conditioned response.

A 2018 review by Karolien van den Akker, Ghislaine Schyns and Anita Jansen adds an asymmetry. Cue-elicited appetitive reactions can be learned readily, in the laboratory and in daily life, but extinguishing them over the long term is more difficult. In the 2026 dataset from Katrijn Houben and colleagues, learned responses spread to new stimuli that shared either the look or the category of the original cue, though more weakly.

In effect

In two preregistered studies, Katrijn Houben and colleagues had participants learn to link one neutral stimulus with a chocolate sweet while a second stimulus was never paired with food. The researchers then tested stimuli that resembled the original cue perceptually or conceptually. Both kinds of similarity produced generalised responses, though weaker than the response to the original cue. The authors suggest that generalisation may widen the range of environmental cues that trigger an appetitive response.

The idea connects to Wendy Wood's account of context cues, in which a setting in which an action has been repeated comes to prompt that action. The Why We article Why do we crave sugar uses both.

What it does not say

The studies and reviews on this page describe food cues in general and use neutral laboratory stimuli, not particular products, places or people. The page describes how researchers explain craving and makes no health, dietary or medical claims.

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