The theory that food consumption has a positive affect on cognitive processes is supported by Humanist psychologist Maslow, who’s hierarchy of needs (1970) theory states that a persons biological needs such as oxygen, water and food must be met before the body can concentrate on needs higher up in the hierarchy triangle such as esteem, cognitive and aesthetic needs (R. Gross, 2001). Since Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, there have been many studies on cognitive processes and how a person’s ability in these areas is affected by food consumption.
The American Psychological Association (2000) has reported that glucose is key for boosting cognitive performance, they also noted however, that …show more content…
Mahoney et all (2005), where it was discovered that eating breakfast improved cognitive processes, with consuming oatmeal being especially affective on improving short term memory in girls.
Caroline R. Mahoney et all also researched “Effect of an afternoon confectionery snack on cognitive processes critical to learning” (2006), results showed improvements in long term memory, with short term memory, however, their participant performed better before the confectionary snack. .
We felt that researching how important having lunch is for a mature students memory recall would further ad to the research that had been done in field. The aim of our experiment is to determine whether or not having eaten a meal, within the past four hours, has an effect on mature students cognitive processes, in particular, memory …show more content…
We thought that an observational method, watching a class of people and seeing how well they concentrate in class after and before having eaten, would be a good way of measuring how well changing the variables affected the results, this, however, would have been very time-consuming, so was decided