Conditioned Taste Aversion
Taste aversion is when an individual avoids food that made him or her ill. And conditioned taste aversion refers to when the subject associates the taste of a certain food with sickness. Conditioned taste aversions are an example of classical conditioning, which is when the subject involuntarily responds to a stimulus other than the original, neutral stimulus. For example, when the previously neutral stimulus, the food, is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, an illness, it leads to an unconditioned response of feeling sick. Ironically, the previously neutral stimulus (the food) is now a conditioned stimulus that elicits a conditioned response (avoidance of food) in jus one pairing.
Researchers (Garcia et al. 1989; Garcia & Koelling, 1966) found that when rats were given a sweetened liquid and then injected with a drug or exposed to radiation, it caused nausea and resulted in the rats not touching the liquid ever again. In retrospect, I had a similar experience of conditioned food aversion when I was in Grade 4. After my soccer practice, I tiredly sat at my dinner table and saw the cooked fish that was served on my plate for the first time. I looked blankly at it, and was hoping that my mom had placed the plate on the wrong side of the table. The smell of the fish was intensifying in the room and it was so repulsive that it made me want to puke. In the midst of my hesitance, my mom came over, grinning, and reminded me of how “this fish is good for [me].” I heeded my mom’s word and started to take massive bites of it. Honestly, it was the most exotic flavor I’ve ever tasted, but I kept eating it because I was so hungry, and I didn’t want to disappoint my mom, who was excited to feed me cooked fish. After finishing eating, I felt so sick that I wanted to puke everything that I consumed. For three days in a row after that dinner, I was nauseous, and vomited numerous times. Even though I had encountered one and only negative experience from eating the fish probably derived from the overconsumption of the fish and my poor condition on that day, I still have a funky stomach whenever I see or hear the word “fish” and of course, I refuse to eat it.
It is interesting to note how a single-trial learning of the neutral stimulus (fish) and the unconditioned stimulus (illness) establishes an immediate automatic response of disgust. And how one negative experience lead to permanent aversion to a certain food. All in all, taste aversions is an important principle that help us better understand ourselves—animals and people tend to form one pairing associations between a certain stimuli, unlike other classical conditioning examples, for if one eats a food and becomes ill, he or she is predisposed to avoid the substance in the future in order to avoid the negative associations that it elicited—and shows human’s tendency to possess a survival mechanism in which the body avoids any potential poisonous substances.
Works Cited
Garcia, J., & Koelling, R. A. (1966). Relation of cue to consequence in avoidance learning. Psychonomic Science, 4, 123–124.
I too can relate to your post. When I was young there was one instance where a bad fever lead to taste aversion. The night prior, before I was truly sick, I ate sunny side up eggs. After I got sick, I felt nauseous at even the thought of sunny-side-up eggs. It took maybe 4 or 5 years for me to begin to like the taste of sunny-side-up eggs. Taste aversions as the text book mentions challenge some of Pavlov’s principles. In taste aversion situations, the conditioned stimulus does not have to occur immediately before the unconditioned stimulus. In my situation, even though I ate the eggs the night before, I still developed a taste aversion to sunny-side-up eggs when I became sick the following day.
In your situation, do you still dislike the taste of all fish or have you relearned to like the taste? My mom always told me that ‘taste changes every 7 years.’ Though I don’t know if her claim was based in science, I do wonder why and how people learn to redevelop appreciations for tastes that they previously disliked.
It also seems like you generalized you aversion just as say Little Albert did with the white rat. In my situation, I only disliked sunny-side-up eggs, but I still loved to eat scrambled or hard-boiled eggs. In your case, you said you cringed any thought of fish. What kind of fish did your mom make that night and do you only dislike that kind of fish or any kind of fish?
I can really relate to your post! When I was younger, I tried a cheeseburger for the first time at my grandparent’s house. After eating the cheeseburger for the first time, I became sick for days and could not stop vomiting. Ever since then, if my family would make cheeseburgers for dinner I would not even be able to sit any where near them because I had developed a taste aversion towards cheeseburgers. Just the smell of them would make me extremely nauseous so I would have to leave the room. Finally, I can eat cheeseburgers, but it took years for me to be able to even stand the sight of them.