Conditioned Cues Elicit Feeding in Sated Rats: A Role for Learning in Meal Initiation
Weingarten trained rats to associate an arbitrary external signal, unrelated to food in itself, with being fed. Once the association was learned, presenting the signal caused the animals to eat even when they were already full, and the meal they ate amounted to around a fifth of their normal daily intake. They compensated afterwards by eating less, which shows the body's regulation was working normally; the cue had simply overridden it at the moment it appeared. The experiment is the origin of the idea that eating is initiated by learning rather than only by depletion, and it is the animal evidence behind claims about environmental cues, advertising and habitual snacking in humans. This vault cites it whenever the question is why people eat when they are not hungry. It is a study in rats, and the inference to human eating requires the human work cited alongside it.
Weingarten trained rats to associate an arbitrary external signal, unrelated to food in itself, with being fed. Once the association was learned, presenting the signal caused the animals to eat even when they were already full, and the meal they ate amounted to around a fifth of their normal daily intake. They compensated afterwards by eating less, which shows the body's regulation was working normally; the cue had simply overridden it at the moment it appeared. The experiment is the origin of the idea that eating is initiated by learning rather than only by depletion, and it is the animal evidence behind claims about environmental cues, advertising and habitual snacking in humans. This vault cites it whenever the question is why people eat when they are not hungry. It is a study in rats, and the inference to human eating requires the human work cited alongside it.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Weingarten, H. P. (1983). "Conditioned cues elicit feeding in sated rats: a role for learning in meal initiation." Science, 220(4595), 431-433. The cue-elicited meal was roughly a fifth of daily intake and was compensated for later.
Where we use it
- Why You Are Hungry an Hour After a Big Lunch, Why We Crave
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6836286
DOI: 10.1126/science.6836286