CONTEXT DEPENDENCY OF CONDITIONED AVERSIONS TO WATER AND SWEET TASTES

Three experiments exposed rats (Rattus norvegicus) to a discriminative conditioning procedure whereby a specific fluid was followed by Lithi um in one environment but not in another. This produced context-specif ic aversion to water, as detected by 2-bottle tests in Experiment 1, a nd a context-dependent saccharin aversion, which was unaffected by con text extinction, in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 found that sucrose pree xposure increased contextual control over the aversion established by sucrose-lithium pairings but had no effect on the target context. By c ontrast, target context exposure during conditioning reduced aversion to this context but did not affect contextual control of the sucrose a version. In conclusion, depending on the conditioning procedures, cont extual control of a taste aversion can be independent of the context's Pavlovian properties.