Paul Rozin
Paul Rozin is a long-standing psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, known for his work on disgust and on the cultural psychology of food. On this site he matters for one study. In 1998, with Susan Dow, Morris Moscovitch and Suparna Rajaram, he offered a second full lunch to two densely amnesic patients shortly after they had finished the first. Both ate it, and usually began a third. Control participants refused.
Who they are
Densely amnesic here means patients who cannot form new memories of events, so a meal eaten twenty minutes ago leaves no trace they can call to mind. That is the whole design. If the decision to stop eating were made by the stomach alone, forgetting the meal should not matter. It mattered a great deal.
He survives the reliability audit cleanly. Not retracted, and of long-standing good repute. In a research area where several of the most famous demonstrations came out of a laboratory whose papers were later retracted, that is not a small thing, and it is why he rather than anybody else is the spine of the article he appears in.
Key papers
Rozin, P., Dow, S., Moscovitch, M., & Rajaram, S. (1998). "What causes humans to begin and end a meal? A role for memory for what has been eaten, as evidenced by a study of multiple meal eating in amnesic patients", Psychological Science, 9(5), 392 to 396. First author. Two patients. Abstract and reported design read.
Key ideas
Say "two patients" out loud, every time. This is a case study and an existence proof, not a measurement. Its strength is that it shows something other than the stomach deciding when a meal is over. It proves nothing about how large that something is in anybody else.
It is a vivid finding and a tiny sample, and the page is better for saying both.
What it establishes is that memory for having eaten belongs in the account of appetite at all. Everything about how much it matters comes from other work.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Rozin, P., Dow, S., Moscovitch, M., & Rajaram, S. (1998). Psychological Science, 9(5), 392 to 396.
- Vault reliability audit, 2026-09-11. No retraction associated with this author.