Readiness to eat and drink: Effect of stimulus conditions.

Abstract

Readiness to eat or drink, i. e., reciprocal of latency to eat or drink when food or water becomes available, was investigated as a function of stimulus conditions prevailing at time of testing. Experiment 1 revealed readiness to eat to be almost independent of complexity of situation. In Experiment 2 readiness increased with prior familiarization with test apparatus, at least for Ss under high hunger. Three other experiments indicated that both readiness to eat and readiness to drink vary significantly but only slightly and somewhat inconsistently with illumination and noise level. Thus, readiness is found to be much less dependent upon stimulus conditions than upon deprivation conditions.