Disruption of a taste familiarity effect by novel exteroceptive stimulation.

Preexposed or familiar tastes are normally retarded relative to novel tastes in acquiring aversive properties as a consequence of being paired with an illness-inducing event. Four experiments are reported which demonstrate that such a taste familiarity effect can be significantly disrupted by exposing the animal to novel exteroceptive stimulation just prior to conditioning with the familiar taste. Implications of this finding for theories of taste aversion learning are discussed, and two potential theoretical accounts of the data are suggested.