We predicted that the longer people had been deprived of food, the lower they would score on the concentration task, and the less time they would spend on the perseverance task. In this study, those deprived of food did give up more quickly on the puzzle, but only in the 12-hour group. Thus, the hypothesis was partially supported for the perseverance task. However, concentration was found to be unaffected by food deprivation, and thus the hypothesis was not supported for that task.
The findings of this study are consistent with those of Green et al.
(1995), where short-term food deprivation did not affect some aspects of cognition, including attentional focus. Taken together, these findings suggest that concentration is not significantly impaired by short-term food deprivation. The findings on perseverance, however, are not as easily explained. We surmise that the participants in the 12-hour group gave up more quickly on the perseverance task because of their hunger produced by the food deprivation. But why, then, did those in the 24-hour group fail to yield the same effect? We postulate that this result can be explained by the concept of “learned industriousness,” wherein participants who perform one difficult task do better on a subsequent task than the participants who never took the initial task (Eisenberger & Leonard,
1980; Hickman, Stromme, & Lippman, 1998). Because participants had successfully completed 24 hours of fasting already, their tendency
