Conditioned Taste Aversion

Conditioned taste aversion occurs when an animal acquires an aversion to the taste of a food that was paired with an aversive stimulus, with the aversion developing more strongly for stimuli that cause nausea than for other kinds of aversive stimuli. It is considered an adaptive trait, a survival mechanism that lets an organism learn to avoid a poisonous substance, such as a poisonous berry, before it causes real harm, reducing future consumption of the same or a similarly tasting substance. Studies on the phenomenon involving irradiated rats were conducted in the 1950s by John Garcia, which is why it is sometimes called the Garcia effect; the aversion can also arise when sickness merely coincides with, rather than is caused by, the substance actually consumed, a variant sometimes called the sauce-bearnaise syndrome, a term coined by Seligman and Hager.