The effects of taste aversion conditioning upon delayed taste discrimination learning

In 1982, Westbrook and Homewood reported that pairing a taste with poison augmented acquisition of subsequent delayed taste aversions. They predicted, however, that an increase in the associability of tastes was limited to tastes paired with illness and would not affect the associability of tastes predictive of some other event. To test this prediction it was first necessary to demonstrate that a conditioned aversive taste could serve as a discriminative stimulus for a water reinforcer in an operant taste discrimination (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 demonstrated that pairing the taste stimulus with poison had no effect on performance of the delayed taste discrimination. The results support the prediction that changes in the associability of a stimulus may be reinforcer-specific.