Learned Avoidance of Flavors Signaling Reduction in a Nutrient

Food-deprived rats learned to avoid a flavor negatively correlated with access to a rich nutrient, 20% maltodextrin (20M) solution. This avoidance in two-bottle choice tests was produced by training consisting of either an unpaired condition where sessions of unflavored 20M were intermixed with sessions of 2 or 3% maltodextrin (2M or 3M) flavored with salt (Experiment 1) or almond (Experiment,; 3 and 4) or a differential conditioning procedure where one flavor was mixed with 20M and another with 2M (Experiment 2). Avoidance was counter-conditioned by mixing the target flavor with 20M (Experiment 1), generalized to a neutral context (Experiment 3), and displayed strong resistance to extinction (Experiment 4). The results demonstrated that food avoidance learning can occur in the absence of an aversive unconditioned stimulus and indicated that impaired control groups and differential conditioning procedures may be misleading in flavor preference learning research when further control conditions are absent.