Harvey Weingarten
Harvey P. Weingarten is the author of a 1983 paper in Science showing that a learned cue could start a full meal in rats that were already full. The animals had been trained so that a signal reliably preceded food. Once the training took, the signal alone was enough to start them eating, with no physiological need to do so. The cue-driven meal came to roughly a fifth of the animals' daily intake.
Who they are
No affiliation is claimed on this page. The vault verified the paper and its reported design rather than his biography, and house practice is to leave the post blank rather than guess at one.
The study matters because of what it separates. Hunger that follows from an empty stomach and hunger that follows from a signal are different things, and this is the cleanest demonstration that the second exists on its own.
Key papers
Weingarten, H. P. (1983). "Conditioned cues elicit feeding in sated rats: a role for learning in meal initiation", Science, 220(4595), 431 to 433. Sole author. A trained signal started a meal in animals that were already sated. Abstract and reported design read.
Key ideas
His own animals compensated afterwards by eating less later. That clause is almost always dropped, and dropping it turns a finding about the timing of eating into a claim about the total, which he never made. Anyone using this study has to carry it.
This is rodent work. It shows a mechanism. It is not proof about people, and it should not be presented as though it were.
The reason it keeps getting cited is that it makes a familiar experience legible. If a cue can summon a meal in an animal with no need for one, then the kitchen clock, the opening credits and the sound of a kettle are all candidates for the same job.
Paired with David Cummings's work on the pre-meal hormone rise, it gives both halves of the same story: the learned signal, and the body's answer to it.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Weingarten, H. P. (1983). Science, 220(4595), 431 to 433.
- Vault note, 2026-09-11. Affiliation deliberately not asserted.