Time-restricted eating (TRE) is an effective way to lose weight and improve metabolic health in animals. Yet whether and how these benefits apply to humans is unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the effect of TRE in people with overweight and obesity statuses. The results showed that TRE led to modest weight loss, lower waist circumference and energy deficits. TRE also improved body mass index, fat mass, lean body mass, systolic blood pressure, fasting glucose levels, fasting insulin levels, and HbA1c%. Subgroup analysis demonstrated more health improvements in the TRE group than the control group under the ad libitum intake condition than in the energy-prescribed condition. Eating time-of-day advantages were only seen when there was considerable energy reduction in the TRE group than the control group (ad libitum condition), implying that the benefits of TRE were primarily due to energy deficit, followed by alignment with eating time of day.

In 3 experiments, we tested 3 possible mechanisms for segmenting overlapping ambiguous strings in Chinese reading. The first 2 characters and the last 2 characters in a 3-character ambiguous string could both constitute a word in the reported studies. The left-priority hypothesis assumes that the word on the left has an advantage in the competition and the other word cannot be processed until the word on the left is recognized. The independent processing hypothesis assumes that words in different positions are processed simultaneously and independently, and the word segmentation ambiguity cannot be settled without the help of sentence context. The competition hypothesis assumes that all of the words compete for a single winner. The results support a competition account that the characters in the perceptual span activate all of the words they can constitute, and any word can win the competition if its activation is high enough.