Common sense suggests that water-deprived or food-deprived organisms should be more willing to consume foods or fluids that would be deemed undesirable under lower states of deprivation. With food, evidence favoring this account has been observed; however other studies find that hungry participants demonstrate increased finickiness--avoiding less…

Based on converging evidence that visual and olfactory images are key components of food cravings, the authors tested a central prediction of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, that mutual competition between modality-specific tasks and desire-related imagery can suppress such cravings. In each of Experiments 1 and 2, 90 undergraduate…