Biological Dispositions in Learning - Chapter 12

Preparedness

• Preparedness is an innate tendency to more easily learn certain types of behaviors or to associate certain types of events with each other.
• It sometimes facilitates or inhibits the classical or operant conditioning of certain behaviors.
• Preparedness can sometimes also result in an overlap between classical and operant conditioning.

Taste Aversion Conditioning

• Taste aversion conditioning is a form of conditioning in which a food item that has been paired with gastrointestinal illness becomes a conditioned aversive stimulus.

• Example:

  • Sweet water (NS): X-ray irradiation (US) - Nausea (UR)
  • Sweet water (CS) - Nausea (CR)
  • Rats now avoid the water

• Taste aversion conditioning is similar to other forms of classical conditioning in showing evidence of such processes as stimulus generalization, overshadowing, blocking, and latent inhibition.

Differences in Taste Aversion Conditioning

• Taste Aversion Conditioning Differs from other forms of classical conditioning in:
  • Formation of associations over long delays
    • X-ray irradiation can occur several hours after drinking the sweet water, but rats will still associate the resultant nausea with the water.
  • One-trial conditioning
    • Conditioning can be reliably obtained with just a single conditioning trial
  • Specificity of association
    • Nausea will be associated only with the taste of the water and not with any other stimuli, such as sounds or lights, in that setting.

CS-US Relevance

• CS-US relevance: Innate tendency to more readily associate certain stimuli with each other (such as the taste of the water with nausea).
• Garcia and Koelling’s (1966) demonstration of CS-US relevance in taste aversion conditioning:
  • They found that whereas rats associated the taste of the water (but not the look or sound of the water) with nausea, they also found that quail would associate the color of a food with nausea more readily than the taste of that food.