title: Conditional control of toxicosis-based conditioning by context.
abstract: This experiment with rat subjects used a conditional discrimination procedure to study the contextual control of flavour aversions. Rats were first given discrimination training with two distinctive contexts, such that a flavour was paired with lithium chloride (LiCl) in context A, alternating with presentations of the flavour alone in context B. Having learned this discrimination, the animals were now required to learn that a second flavour was followed by toxicosis in context B and nonreinforced in the other context. The rats were capable of learning to reject each of the flavours in the context where the fluid-LiCl pairings had been given, but not in the alternative context. This result is interpreted as evidence that the context acts as an occasion setter in the sense that it controls the effectiveness of a conditioned aversion in a manner independent of any direct context-illness association.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicologı́a, Universidad de Oviedo, Plaza de Feijoo s/n, E-33003 Oviedo, Spain.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Loy
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: López