1 hour ago, RealtreeByGod said:

Maybe I'm just baselessly generalizing and speculating but I feel like bigger bass are less hungry because they can eat bigger and more filling meals and therefore won't be as likely to chase lures. Like, a 5lb bass choking down 4-8 inch bluegills doesn't feel like it needs to eat as much as a 1.5lb bass subsisting on minnows and small crawdads.

This theory has been proven in the muskie realm. Stomach content studies of muskies has shown they have a preferred diet of mostly soft rayed fish like suckers and ciscos that are larger in size. This would also explain why they are tougher to catch. They eat bigger meals far less often. Could really big bass have a similar preferred feeding pattern? Certainly possible although I think a bass diet is more diverse overall than a muskie diet.

At a minimum they can be patterned to stimulus/response behavior. And if you don't beleive that you've never been near a bluegill feeder going off. And even better the bass chowing down on the bluegill. 

 

That doesn't mean other responses won't override override a learned stimulus/response behavior, otherwise they'd stop biting what we are throwing. One of the books covered this in particular with hardbaits - they said that besides worm-style baits (IMO jigs fit here too), eventually they stop biting it. I think this is part of the argument I made to myself about getting fish back in the water with as little trauma as possible - less likely to imprint than getting boat flipped. Do I know for sure? Nah. But it is pretty reasonable that if you can positively train a fish to do certain things, a negative stimulus would do the same.

 

Are big fish more intelligent? Probably not. More experience? Definitely.