CONDITIONING WITH TASTE AS THE CS IN CONDITIONED FLAVOR PREFERENCE LEARNING

There appear to be unconditioned affective reactions to the four basic tastes: liking for sweet and salt and disliking for sour and bitter. We attempted to modify these reactions by pairing the tastes with calo ries and with sweeter tastes. Differing sucrose concentrations were in effective in reversing the preference for salt over citric acid or for saccharin over quinine. We could, however, reverse the preference for salt over citric acid, producing an actual preference for sour over s alt, by using sucrose and saccharin as the reinforcers. The initial re actions to tastes could also be modified by reducing the initial diffe rence in affect produced by the tastes through mixing both tastes with sucrose.