John Garcia

John Garcia (1917 to 2012) was an American psychologist best known for his research on conditioned taste aversion, sometimes called the Garcia effect. Born to a farm family near Santa Rosa, California, he worked in many trades and served in the Army Air Corps before using the G.I. Bill to study at Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in 1955. While studying the effects of radiation on rats he noticed they avoided water from plastic bottles, and further experiments showed that an animal made ill after a new taste would avoid that taste even when the illness came hours later, and that tastes, unlike sights or sounds, readily become linked to nausea. This challenged the view that any stimulus could be paired with any other. He held posts at UCLA, Utah and Stony Brook and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.