Food deprivation disrupts normal holistic processing of domain-specific stimuli

Food deprivation has been shown to lead to a set of biological and psychological responses, including a decrease in perceptual thresholds, and an increase in attentional allocation for domain-specific, food-related stimuli. Here, we tested whether food deprivation could lead to a qualitative change in the way food is perceived. To this purpose, we tested the effect of food deprivation on a basic feature of human perception, the holistic processing of object shape. In three experiments, we examined the effect of food deprivation on participants' susceptibility to the height-width illusion, which served as a maker for holistic processing. In all experiments, food deprivation led to an abnormal, non-holistic processing of shape, which resulted in a total reduction of the illusion for food-related, but not for control stimuli. These results show that food deprivation alters the way food is perceived, and propose that motivational factors modulate people's resistance to perceptual distortions for domain-specific stimuli.