Medically Reviewed by Poonam Sachdev on December 01, 2021 Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) occurs when you associate the taste of certain foods with symptoms of an illness. Taste aversions are relatively common in humans. They are an adaptive trait that goes a long way in protecting you against eating illness-inducing things like bacteria and fungi. In children, the discovery and acceptance of tastes starts as early as three to six months. Their reaction to different tastes also evolves with age. That’s why infants are more likely to reject new foods if it results in a negative experience such as an upset stomach or diarrhea. You may notice that your child avoids that specific food in the future. Generally, CTA arises when food consumption is followed by symptoms of sickness like nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. However, a taste aversion can also arise from an illness unrelated to the food you ate. One example of a conditioned taste aversion is getting nausea or vomiting after drinking milk and then avoiding it after the incident. Rather than being caused by the milk, your nausea and other symptoms could have been caused by other conditions, including:
Other causes of conditioned taste aversions include:
Some of the ways you can deal with a conditioned taste aversion include: When Is Conditioned Taste Aversion a Problem? While CTA is your body’s survival mechanism, it can also be a sign of a more serious condition, such as anorexia, bulimia, stomach flu, or liver failure. Consult your doctor if taste aversions affect your ability to eat a balanced diet.
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Humans can develop an aversion to a food if they become sick after eating it. The particular food did not physically make them sick, but classical conditioning teaches them to have an aversion to that food since sickness immediately followed the consumption of it. We can relate this to Pavlov’s experiments, like the example we discussed in class where the dog is classically conditioned to salivate at the sound of a tone, using food. When I was little I had a personal experience with taste aversion. Whenever I had the flu, my mom would give me ginger ale to try to help settle my stomach. However, after drinking the ginger ale I would still inevitably throw up since I had the flu. I developed a taste aversion to ginger ale because while I was sick, I would drink ginger ale and then throw up shortly after. This means that when I would drink ginger ale, when I didn’t have the flu, I would still feel sick as if I was about to throw up. In this ginger ale example, the unconditioned stimulus, which is the stimulus that naturally elicits a response, is the fact that I had the flu. The unconditioned response, which is the naturally occurring response, would be throwing up. The conditioned stimulus, the stimulus that was originally irrelevant, would be the ginger ale. And the conditioned response, which is the learned response that happens as a result of the conditioned stimulus, is throwing up. The thing about taste aversion, and all examples of classical conditioning, is that this response does not necessarily last forever. Over time, I have experienced “extinction,” which means that my response to the ginger ale has diminished. Since I’ve continued to drink ginger ale, and each time I’ve felt less and less sick afterwards. If I were to get the flu now, drink ginger ale, and then get sick shortly after, I might experience what’s called “spontaneous recovery,” meaning that my response would reappear for a while, and then become extinct again. Another interesting thing that could happen is that other carbonated drinks, such as sprite, or sierra mist, might make me feel sick as well because of generalization. Generalization is the tendency for a similar stimulus to elicit a similar response. The response is not nearly as strong, because of discrimination (the ability to discriminate between a conditioned stimulus and another stimulus) but it still may exist.
This is an excellent question. The difference between Classical conditioning (also called Pavlovian conditioning) and operant (instrumental) conditioning is subtle for the new student, but can be quite profound when fully appreciated. Pavlovian conditioning is learning a response that you have no control over. In this context, a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) might be produced by mildly poisoning a rat after it eats watermelon for the first time. Or you might suffer food poisoning after eating a watermelon. The CS is the watermelon. The usual response to watermelon is licking lips and paws, and savouring the sweet flavour - any rat version of yum you can think of. However after poisoning (where the US is usually denoted by the poisoning method, e.g. weak lithium chloride injections), the new response is gaping, retching and avoiding the now yucky flavour. In people who get food poisoning, we know the actual flavour of the food changes from pleasant to revolting, and can even elicit retching and vomiting. This response won't change even if you tell the person the next watermelon is fresh and sweet. In other words, the subject of the CTA cannot change their response (yucky flavour/retching) to the CS at will. This obviously creates a problem when a CTA is produced as a side-effect of medical treatment such as chemotherapy. Which is why people on chemo will often only be fed very bland and boring foods (to reduce the chance of a CTA). Even telling the person the chemo is causing the nausea is not sufficient to change their opinion of the foods they ate shortly before they felt sick. By contrast, instrumental conditioning is learning a response you have control over. E.g., training a rat to press a lever for watermelon (or a person buying watermelon from the grocer). In this case you or the rat has control over the action (lever pressing or shopping at the grocer). So after a rat is convinced to press a lever for sweet juicy watermelon, if the rat gets poisoned by the watermelon then it will simply stop pressing the lever. Here the instrumental response to a CTA is 'avoidance'. Just as you would stop shopping at a grocer who previously sold you a bad watermelon. If however the owner of the grocery changed, you might be happy to resume shopping for watermelon there. Note that while you may no longer avoid shopping for watermelon, your Pavlovian response to the bad watermelon might still be intact - i.e., you might retch when you first bite into the fresh watermelon you just bought. This can obviously create odd situations where animals will work for food they do not want. Whenever experimental psychologists are faced with a learned response they don't understand, one of the first things they will do is ask whether the response is Pavlovian or instrumental. The classic way to test this is with an omission schedule. Under an omission schedule, the reward is removed if the animal makes the response. If the animal continues to make the response, then the response is clearly not under instrumental control. If you look up some of Anthony Dickinson's work on this subject, you will discover many weird and wondrous examples of this distinction, especially in his incentive learning research. A lot of behaviour we think of as instrumental, is probably Pavlovian - e.g., a dog approaching a food bowl when he hears the can opener. One place to start is Dickinson, 1981, Conditioning and associative learning, British Medical Journal, 37 (2), 165-168 |
Conditioned taste aversions are an example of something called
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