“Do you think there is physical or mental change to how a bass acts toward lures during a weekend vs a weekday on any given pressured lake? Do their bodies some how recognize there is more "boat noise" and turn off on weekends?”
NO and YES
A fish has a brain the size of a pea, without the ability to reason. They do, however, instinctively react to their environment. Their activity levels are a direct result of external influences (cold water, barometric pressure, position of the sun and moon, to name a few.
They can, however become conditioned to those same factors and others like constant noise, or a certain lure.
Boat noise isn’t one of those.
You can fish a large marina on a busy week-end and catch fish with the same consistency as you would during mid-week. I caught my PB at the time, on a July 4th weekend mid-day, with jet skiers and pleasure boats constantly running by me.
Fishing pressure and certain lures that they see regularly fall into a conditioning response. They don’t recognize a certain lure and avoid it. They avoid it because of the threat it represents. I don’t normally attribute human reactions to animals, but as an infant, you don’t know not to touch fire until you’ve been burnt or warned of the danger.