Food for thought: The impact of short term fasting on cognitive ability

Abstract

Growing evidence suggests that resource scarcity can severely impede individuals’ cognitive capacity, resulting in sub-optimal decision making. Few experimental studies investigate whether food deprivation as a form of resource scarcity influences decisions in other non-hunger related domains. We examine the effect of short term fasting on cognitive capacity by exogenously manipulating individuals’ fasting time in a laboratory experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: 1) 3-hour fast; 2) 12-hour fast; and 3) control, in which participants were not required to fast and consumed a protein shake upon arriving to the lab. Following the manipulation, participants completed the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test which measures cognitive function. Although we find null treatment effects on cognitive ability, our results provide evidence that short term fasting does not directly inhibit cognition.