Temporal characteristics of nutritive drinking in rats and humans.

Abstract

As they approached satiation 11 male albino Holtzman rats and 30 male undergraduates showed a decrease in proportion of time spent drinking liquid food which was accountable: (a) in rats, to a decrease in burst duration and an increase in pause duration; and (b) in humans, to an increase in pause duration. Humans showed good caloric regulation in response to various preloads of the test food. Within bursts of licks, recorded exhaustively by a digital computer, rats approaching satiation showed a decrease in duration of contact between tongue and tube, an increase in the time to the next contact, and no change in interlick interval. All of the latter were between-burst effects, and not within-burst effects. Comparisons were made between nutritive and nonnutritive regulation of microbehavioral aspects of ingestion in rats, and implications were discussed for multistage interpretations of satiation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)