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The Lessons I Learned from Taste Aversion Conditioning
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Spector, Alan C. Smith, James Charles |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | Florida State University in Tallahassee. As Dr. Spector notes in his highlight, his association with aversion learning dates back to his early work with Jim Smith at Florida State on radiationinduced aversions in humans and the analysis within an animal model of the various factors that might impact such learning. His graduate work focused on a host of issues in aversion learning, two of which he describes as important in his training for his later work in animal psychophysics, i.e., the individual variation in behavioral output and the dissociation among multiple measures of a common phenomenon. Interestingly, neither of these issues has been resolved in taste aversion learning, although both issues remain important to understanding behavioral processes associated with conditioning and learning. From his graduate work with Smith, Dr. Spector joined Harvey Grill at the University of Pennsylvania where he utilized the taste reactivity assay developed by Grill and Norgren to examine specific mechanisms that might underlie the failure of animals with lesions of the parabrachial nucleus to display aversive reactions to intraorally-infused saccharin that was paired with LiCl. Dr. Spector notes the various interpretations associated with any failure to display such reactions and described his work that demonstrated that the failure in such lesioned animals was likely a function of the failure to acquire the taste-LiCl association. Dr. Spector’s more recent work has focused on the use of the taste aversion design as a tool to examine issues related to taste psychophysics. He describes several findings from his laboratory in which the taste aversion procedure was used to carefully and systematically assay the taste characteristics of a number of stimuli, e.g., amiloride hydrochloride, l-serine and l-threonine. Dr. Spector’s work has itself been characterized by thoughtful and methodologically sound science that integrates behavior and basic neurobiology, an approach nicely illustrated in his 2000 review “Linking gustatory neurobiology to behavior in vertebrates” in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (24, 391416). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://w.american.edu/cas/psychology/cta/highlights/Spector_Highlight.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
