Suzanne Higgs
Suzanne Higgs is an appetite researcher at the University of Birmingham, and her programme on memory for eating is the most useful and least cited body of work in this area. From 2002 onwards she established two matching results: prompting people to remember their last meal reduces how much they snack afterwards, and disrupting the laying down of that memory, by having people eat while distracted, increases it.
Who they are
The reason this matters is that it puts something other than the stomach into the account of appetite. If remembering lunch changes how much you eat at four o'clock, then part of what stops a meal is a record of having had one, and records can be spoiled. Eating in front of a screen is the ordinary way of spoiling one.
She is a co-author of the 2013 meta-analysis that pooled the literature on eating attentively.
Key papers
Higgs, S. (2002). "Memory for recent eating and its influence on subsequent food intake", Appetite. The founding study of the programme.
Higgs, S., Williamson, A. C., & Attwood, A. S. (2008). Physiology and Behavior; Higgs, S., & Woodward, M. (2009), on television and later snacking; Higgs, S. (2016). "Cognitive processing of food rewards", Appetite. Abstract level.
Robinson, E., et al. (2013). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 97(4), 728 to 742, with Higgs as a co-author. The pooled analysis of the attentive-eating literature.
Key ideas
Her own group published the failures on her own effect. In Appetite in 2018 they reported two laboratory experiments finding nothing from focused attention while eating. That deserves saying plainly and without spin: it is the behaviour the house standards exist to reward.
Where this site lands, both halves in the same paragraph. Memory for eating is a real and repeatedly demonstrated influence on later appetite. The practical attention manipulations built on top of it are inconsistent.
Nothing here is advice about how to eat. It is an account of one of the things that decides when a meal feels finished.
Concepts on this site
Eating Rate, an adjacent idea that has no page on this site yet
Sources
- Higgs, S. (2002). Appetite; Higgs, Williamson & Attwood (2008), Physiology and Behavior; Higgs & Woodward (2009); Higgs, S. (2016), Appetite. All read at abstract level.
- Robinson, E., et al. (2013). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 97(4), 728 to 742.
- The 2018 null results from her own group, Appetite, recorded here as part of the same account.