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Conditioned Taste Aversion

Conditioned taste aversion is when an animal learns to avoid a food that once made it feel sick.

Think of it this way

A red bowl on the counter holds food that once made you feel sick. You felt fine before you ate from that bowl, and you felt awful after. Now you pull your hand back the moment you see that red bowl. Your brain linked the bowl to the bad feeling, so the warning fires before you taste a thing.

Explaining conditioned taste aversion by grade level

If a mouse eats something and then feels sick, it will not eat that food again. The mouse links the taste to the bad feeling. Even if the food is safe later, the mouse still stays away. One bad time is enough for the mouse to learn.

Projects that explore conditioned taste aversion

Mice and Bad-Taste Memory

When mice eat food that made them feel sick, that memory can last for days. To measure how long it persists, you set up two cages with four mice each. On day one, you add lithium chloride (a bitter-tasting chemical) to the food in cage one; cage two gets plain food. At the end of the day you weigh the leftover food to see how much each group ate. On day two both cages get plain food. On day three you add lithium chloride to cage one again — if the mice remember the bad taste, they should eat even less than they did on day one.

Medium