Three experiments exposed rats (Rattus norvegicus) to a discriminative conditioning procedure whereby a specific fluid was followed by lithium in one environment but not in another. This produced context-specific aversion to water, as detected by 2-bottle tests in Experiment 1, and a context-dependent saccharin aversion, which was unaffected by context extinction, in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 found that sucrose preexposure increased contextual control over the aversion established by sucrose-lithium pairings but had no effect on the target context. By contrast, target context exposure during conditioning reduced aversion to this context but did not affect contextual control of the sucrose aversion. In conclusion, depending on the conditioning procedures, contextual control of a taste aversion can be independent of the context's Pavlovian properties.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.