Visual discrimination pretraining facilitates subsequent visual cue/toxicosis conditioning in rats

The present experiments were undertaken to determine whether rats pretrained to use visual cues in selecting food objects would subsequently learn toxicosis-induced aversions to visually novel foods. We found that rats that had been pretrained to use visual features of their food in selecting palatable items for ingestion rapidly acquired aversions to visually novel foods ingested prior to toxicosis onset. Control subjects, lacking such visual discrimination pretraining, failed to acquire an illness-based aversion to visually novel foods.