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The feeling of hunger is an inseparable part of people's daily lives. It has been established that hunger, caused by food deprivation, influences people's physiological and emotional state and their everyday behavior. Yet, it remains unclear whether and in which manner food deprivation affects the way people perceive their environment. In two experiments, we examined the effects of food deprivation on the perceptual resolution of food portion size. We calculated Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) to measure sensitivity to detect the smallest difference between two stimuli of different sizes. Participants' resolution in both experiments was higher to detect changes in food size compared with baseline when they were hungry due to a short period of food deprivation. Food deprivation did not lead to any biases in the average perception of food size. The results show that food deprivation changes the way people perceive their environment. We discuss the possible role of attention in mediating the effect of food deprivation on the visual resolution of food size.

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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.