No Effect of Hunger on the Memory of Food Images and Prices

Purpose

Food acquisition is an adaptive problem resolved via both physiological and psychological processes. Hunger could serve as a coordinating mechanism for these processes. When hunger increases, it may be beneficial to shift cognitive resources away from other adaptive problems and towards functions that increase the chances of acquiring food, such as memory for food information. However, there is limited research exploring the impacts of hunger on food-related memory, and the results are mixed. We conducted two studies investigating whether increased hunger levels improve memory for food images and prices – but not non-food images and prices – in image recognition and price recall tasks, respectively.

Methods

Study 1 was an online, observational study (N = 91) using self-reported hunger as a continuous measure. Study 2 was an in-person, between-subjects interventional study (N = 102) where participants were randomly allocated to a hungry or sated condition. We predicted that higher levels of hunger would improve participants’ ability to discriminate between food images they have and have not seen before and correctly recall food prices.

Results

We found no evidence of a hunger-related memory enhancement for food stimuli in either study in image recognition or price recall tasks.

Conclusion

Our findings contrast with older research but support more recent work, suggesting that the effect of hunger on food memory may be sensitive to study design and not as broadly generalisable as first thought.