Dynamic effects of food magnitude on interim-terminal interaction.
Bigger meals make rats drink more between feedings, and the effect is about meal timing, not the food itself.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team fed rats on a fixed-interval food schedule. They changed only the size of each food pellet.
They watched how much the rats drank between meals. They wanted to see if bigger meals made the rats drink more.
What they found
Larger meals did boost drinking. The extra drinking came from how the rats spread out food-linked acts, not from the food itself.
In plain words, the timing of meal behavior drove the water intake, not direct food cues.
How this fits with other research
Reid et al. (1987) ran almost the same setup but saw an inverted-U: drinking rose, then fell, as meals got bigger. The two papers look opposite, yet both agree that drinking tracks meal parameters; the curve shape likely differs because the later study tested wider meal sizes.
Castilla et al. (2013) added food deprivation to the mix. They showed that both bigger meals and stronger hunger grow adjunctive drinking, extending the 1983 result into real-world hunger levels you might see in clinical cases.
Older work like Thompson et al. (1971) already linked large meals to more drinking; the 1983 paper refines this by showing the effect is about the distribution of food acts, not just size.
Why it matters
If a client shows odd water intake around meals, think about meal size and hunger level before treating the drinking as a separate problem. You can test smaller, more frequent meals or adjust feeding times to see if the adjunctive behavior drops. This gives you a low-risk environmental lever that may cut excessive drinking or other schedule-induced responses.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We tested the assumption of a facilitatory relation between periodic food presentation and schedule-induced drinking by examination of (a) elicited drinking, (b) drinking in anticipation of food delivery, and (c) possible indirect effects of food delivery on drinking. We exposed rats to a fixed-time 60-second schedule in which interfood intervals ended in either one or four food pellets with equal probability. In Phases 1 and 3, a stimulus signaled the magnitude of upcoming food presentation. In Phase 2, the stimulus was eliminated. Changes in drinking and "head-in-feeder" distributions within interfood intervals demonstrated that head-in-feeder was controlled directly by food presentation, but drinking was not. Head-in-feeder increased and drinking was reduced when large meals began or ended an interval. In Phases 4 to 6, meal size was manipulated across sessions yielding a positive relation between meal size and schedule-induced drinking. We conclude: (1) Schedule-induced drinking is determined by distributions of food-related behavior and results from indirect effects of food delivery; and (2) the amount of schedule-induced drinking and the form of the drinking distributions in this experiment can be accurately explained by two assumptions: (a) Food presentation facilitates food-related behavior through elicitation and anticipation; and (b) food-related behavior and drinking are reciprocally, linearly related.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1983 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1983.39-135