Rats self-administered i.v. delivered cocaine (0.1 mg/kg) under conditions of continuous access (session length 24 hr). Each lever press resulted in an infusion according to a fixed-ratio 1 schedule. Food was continuously available except for every third session, when the rats were food deprived, i.e., provided with only 8 g at the start of the session. After behavior stabilized, the rats were ...

OBJECTIVES Physical access to stores selling groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables (FV) is essential for urban dwellers. In Canadian cities where low-density development practices are common, social and material deprivation may be compounded by poor geographic access to healthy food. This case study examines access to food stores selling fresh FV in Gatineau, Quebec, to identify areas where poo...

Daily food intake in rats was temporarily reduced by the introduction of an activity wheel and temporarily increased by the subsequent removal of the wheel. When this outcome is coupled with the positive relation between food deprivation and running-and food deprivation is seen as a loss of eating rather than as a physiological state-there is the suggestion that the total behavior output of the...

Animal signals are hypothesized to be costly in order to honestly reflect individual quality. Offspring solicitation signals given by nestling birds are thought to have evolved to advertise either need or individual quality. We tested the potential role of testosterone (T) in controlling the intensity of these signals by measuring begging behaviour as: (i) duration of the begging display and (i...

Thwarting of feeding behaviour in the laying hen results in an increase in stereotyped pacing, displacement preening, and the gakel-call. These behaviours therefore reflect the frustration arousal caused by the thwarting of feeding behaviour. This raises the question whether the level of frustration also varies with the intensity of the motivation to perform the thwarted behaviour. This study i...

Food deprivation alters the processing of sensory information, increasing neural activity in the olfactory and gustatory systems in animals across phyla. Neural signaling is metabolically costly, and a hungry animal has limited energy reserves, so we hypothesized that neural activity in other systems may be downregulated by food deprivation. We investigated this hypothesis in the motion vision ...

Animals use gustatory information to assess the suitability of potential food sources and make critical decisions on what to consume. For example, the taste of sugar generally signals a potent dietary source of carbohydrates. However, the intensity of the sensory response to a particular sugar, or "sweetness," is not always a faithful reporter of its nutritional value, and recent evidence sugge...

In this study we examined the effects of anxiety and food deprivation on the amount of food consumed ad lib by dieters and nondieters. Eighty female college students served as subjects in an ostensible market research study in which an anxiety manipulation was embedded. Reassignment of the subjects to anxiety condition on the basis of self-reported anxiety produced a significant (p < .02) three...

OBJECTIVE To determine the extent to which neighborhood needs (socioeconomic deprivation and vehicle availability) are associated with two criteria of food environment access: 1) distance to the nearest food store and fast food restaurant and 2) coverage (number) of food stores and fast food restaurants within a specified network distance of neighborhood areas of colonias, using ground-truthed ...