If You want to fight the flab during the party season, you will be trying to push thoughts of tasty treats out of your mind. Imagining eating a particular food may, however, help us put away less of the real thing. Joachim Vosgerau at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues studied the effect of mental processes on habituation - the weakening of our response to a stimulus when it is repeated. Knowing that our responses to sensory perception and mental representation overlap - for example, the thought of a spider crawling up your leg can induce the same sweat response as the real thing -Vosgerairs team reasoned that thinking about eating food could lead people to habituate to the action itself.
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