Cognitive control of food intake: The effects of manipulating memory for recent eating.

The importance of memory in appetite control has been appreciated for some time, but previous work has focused on the influence of memory for the predicted consequences of eating acquired over repeated experiences, e.g. as in associative conditioning of flavor preferences. In contrast, there has been little investigation of the role of episodic memory. We have examined whether manipulating memory for the specific attributes of foods eaten recently affects subsequent consumption. Enhancing memory for recent eating by cueing participants to recall their lunchtime meal suppressed snack intake later that afternoon relative to an uncued group. This effect of meal recall was specific to food eaten that day, because asking participants to remember lunch consumed the previous day had no effect on subsequent snack intake. We have further shown that cued-recall of lunch does not decrease snack intake at a session 1-h post-lunch but does decrease intake 3-h post-lunch (when some forgetting of the meal is likely to have occurred). The delay-dependency of the effect suggests it is a memory-related phenomenon. Furthermore, we found that disrupting memory for a recent meal by distracting participants at lunch led to an increase in afternoon snack consumption compared with a non-distracted group. These data are consistent with reports of multiple meal consumption in amnesic patients who are unable to remember having just eaten. It is concluded that representation in memory of information relating to foods that have been eaten in the recent past may have a role to play in controlling everyday eating.