Abstract
The present experiments were undertaken to determine whether rats pretrained to use visual cues in selecting food objects would subsequently learn toxicosis-induced aversions to visually novel foods. We found that rats that had been pretrained to use visual features of their food in selecting palatable items for ingestion rapidly acquired aversions to visually novel foods ingested prior to toxicosis onset. Control subjects, lacking such visual discrimination pretraining, failed to acquire an illness-based aversion to visually novel foods.
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This research was supported by grants from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the McMaster University Research Board to B. G. Galef, Jr. We thank Paul Henne, Lynda Ashbourne, and Steven Wigmore for their assistance in filling by hand the more than 10,000 gelatin capsules used in the present experiments and the Parke-Davis Company, Ltd., Brockville, Ontario, for supplying said capsules without charge. The experiments reported here formed part of a dissertation submitted by the first author to McMaster University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the PhD degree.
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Dalrymple, A.J., Galef, B.G. Visual discrimination pretraining facilitates subsequent visual cue/toxicosis conditioning in rats. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 18, 267–270 (1981). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333623
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333623