Psychologists  have known that what's going on inside our head affects our senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter. Professor Remi Radel wanted to investigate(look into) how this happens -- whether it's right away, as the brain receives signals from the eyes, or a little later, as the brain's higher-level thinking processes get involved. Radel chose 42 students and each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating on the day of the test. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten. For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word, the person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they'd seen -- a food-related word like gateau (cake) or a neutral   word like bateau (boat). Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen, this means that the difference is in perception  , Radel says--it's not because of some kind of processing happening in the brain after you've already figured out what you're looking at. "This is something great to me, that humans can really realize what they need or what they hope for, to know that our brain can really arrange for our motives and needs," Radel says. "There is something inside us that selects information in the world to make life easier." Which of the following is true about the experiment?
The students should stare at the words in the book. Each word appeared slowly in order that the participant could read it exactly. After each word flashed on the screen, the person was asked to finish two tasks. On the day of the test, all the students were very hungry because of the delay of their lunch.